Performance Enhancement of Transport Layer Handover on Single-Homed Mobile Nodes

Michio HONDA
Yoshifumi NISHIDA
Jin NAKAZAWA
Hideyuki TOKUDA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E90-B    No.10    pp.2683-2692
Publication Date: 2007/10/01
Online ISSN: 1745-1345
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e90-b.10.2683
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Section on New Challenge for Internet Technology and its Architecture)
Category: 
Keyword: 
mobile computing,  handover,  transport protocol,  SCTP,  single wireless interface,  

Full Text: PDF(1MB)>>
Buy this Article


Summary: 
Many handover techniques in the Internet have been introduced with the development of mobile computing technologies. Although many proposed handover schemes utilize multiple wireless interfaces, having multiple wireless interfaces in a mobile device increases its power consumption, device installation space, and hardware costs. We have been studying handover schemes for mobile nodes with a single wireless interface. To achieve seamless and efficient handover, we focus on Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) that offers a message-oriented, reliable and connection-oriented delivery transport service. Unlike other transport protocols like TCP, SCTP can provide an end-to-end handover mechanism with multi-homing feature. However, the handover mechanism in the current SCTP causes large handover latency particularly when a mobile node has only one single wireless interface. This paper investigates the current issues of the SCTP handover mechanism, and proposes a new efficient handover scheme based on SCTP, which identifies a communication path as a pair of source and destination address. Additionally, we modified SCTP behavior when an SCTP endpoint received a SET PRIMARY message to change primary destination of peer endpoint. This paper shows that our scheme can reduce the handover latency by two to thirty seconds.