Seamless Soft Handoff In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In our MILCOM 2006 paper [1], we have presented an integrated architecture for seamless soft handoff in mobile ad hoc networks, where various managers residing on multiple layers are proposed to tackle handoff issues in a cross-layer and cooperative manner. In this paper, we first demonstrate the handoff performance under nontrivial node mobility. Simulations show that our handoff scheme provides practically equivalent results as the benchmark with no handoff, which indicates that our scheme is quite resistant to node mobility. Next we investigate the general handoff problems where each node can possess multiple radios and nodes are randomly dispersed in some region. In this case, the network topology forms a multi-linked graph (multigraph). By converting the multigraph to simple graphs, our extensive simulations show that our scheme can render low latency, low overhead handoff with minimum packet loss. Finally, we study the synergies with IEEE 802.21 and describe how to integrate IEEE 802.21 into our multi-layer architecture.