IEEE 802.11 is an economical and efficient standard that has been applied to vehicular networks. However, the long handoff latency of the standard handoff scheme for IEEE 802.11 has become an important issue for seamless roaming in vehicular environments, as more handoffs may be triggered due to the higher mobility of vehicles. This thesis presents a new and fast location-based handoff scheme particularly designed for vehicular environments. With the position and movement direction of a vehicle and the locations of the surrounding APs, our protocol is able to accurately predict several possible APs that the vehicle may visit in the future and to assign these APs different priority levels. APs on higher priority levels will be first scanned. Once a response to scanning from an AP is received, the scanning process ends immediately. A blacklist scheme is also used to exclude those APs that showed no response to the scanning during previous handoffs. Thus, time spent on scanning APs is supposed to be significantly reduced. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme attains not only a lower prediction error rate, but also a lower MAC layer handoff latency, and that it has a smaller influence on jitter and throughput; moreover, these results show that the proposed scheme has a smaller total number of handoffs than other handoff schemes.

IEEE 802.11 is an economical and efficient standard that has been applied to vehicular networks. However, the long handoff latency of the standard handoff scheme for IEEE 802.11 has become an important issue for seamless roaming in vehicular environments, as more handoffs may be triggered due to the higher mobility of vehicles. This thesis presents a new and fast location-based handoff scheme particularly designed for vehicular environments. With the position and movement direction of a vehicle and the locations of the surrounding APs, our protocol is able to accurately predict several possible APs that the vehicle may visit in the future and to assign these APs different priority levels. APs on higher priority levels will be first scanned. Once a response to scanning from an AP is received, the scanning process ends immediately. A blacklist scheme is also used to exclude those APs that showed no response to the scanning during previous handoffs. Thus, time spent on scanning APs is supposed to be significantly reduced. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme attains not only a lower prediction error rate, but also a lower MAC layer handoff latency, and that it has a smaller influence on jitter and throughput; moreover, these results show that the proposed scheme has a smaller total number of handoffs than other handoff schemes.

Recent advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have overcome the drawbacks of traditional wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. WMNs will play a leading role in the next generation of networks, and the question of how to provide smooth mobility for WMNs is the driving force behind the research. The inherent characteristics of WMNs, such as relatively static backbones and highly mobile clients, require new handoff management solutions to be designed and implemented. This thesis first presents our research work on handoff management schemes in traditional WMNs. In general, a handoff process includes two parts, the MAC layer handoff and the network layer handoff. For the MAC layer handoff, a self-configured handoff scheme with dynamic adaptation is presented. Before the mobile node starts the probe process, it configures parameters for each channel to optimize the scan process. Moreover, a fast authentication scheme to reduce authentication latency for WiFi-based mesh networks is introduced. A tunnel is introduced to forward data packets between the new access router and the original reliable access router to recover data communication before the complete authentication process is finished. To minimize the network layer handoff latency, a hybrid routing protocol for forwarding packets is proposed: this involves both the link layer routing and the network layer routing. Based on the hybrid routing protocol, both intra-domain and inter-domain handoff management have been designed to support smooth roaming in WMNs. In addition, we extend our work to Vehicular Mesh Networks (VMNs). Considering the characteristics of VMNs, a fast handoff scheme is introduced to reduce handoff latency by using a multi-hop clustering algorithm. Using this scheme, vehicle nodes are divided into different multi-hop clusters according to the relative mobility. Some vehicle nodes are selected as assistant nodes; and these assistant nodes will help the cluster head node to determine the next access router for minimizing handoff latency. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reduce handoff latency significantly.

<p>The past few years have seen great increases in the use of portable devices like laptops, palmtops, etc. This has also led to the dramatic increase demand on wireless local area networks (WLAN) due to the flexibility and ease of use that it offers. Mobile IP and handover are important issues to be considered as these devices move within and between different networks and still have to maintain connectivity. It is, therefore, imperative to ensure seamless mobile IP handover for these devices as they move about.</p><p>In this thesis we undertake a survey to describe the real processes involved in mobile IP handover in WLAN environment for different scenarios. Our work also identifies individual sources of delay during the handoff process, the sum total of which makes up the total latency. Other factors that could militate against the aim of having a seamless handoff in an inter-subnet network roaming were also considered as well as some proposed solutions. These factors are security, packet loss and triangle routing.</p>

Recent advances in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have overcome the drawbacks of traditional wired networks and wireless ad hoc networks. WMNs will play a leading role in the next generation of networks, and the question of how to provide smooth mobility for WMNs is the driving force behind the research. The inherent characteristics of WMNs, such as relatively static backbones and highly mobile clients, require new handoff management solutions to be designed and implemented. This thesis first presents our research work on handoff management schemes in traditional WMNs. In general, a handoff process includes two parts, the MAC layer handoff and the network layer handoff. For the MAC layer handoff, a self-configured handoff scheme with dynamic adaptation is presented. Before the mobile node starts the probe process, it configures parameters for each channel to optimize the scan process. Moreover, a fast authentication scheme to reduce authentication latency for WiFi-based mesh networks is introduced. A tunnel is introduced to forward data packets between the new access router and the original reliable access router to recover data communication before the complete authentication process is finished. To minimize the network layer handoff latency, a hybrid routing protocol for forwarding packets is proposed: this involves both the link layer routing and the network layer routing. Based on the hybrid routing protocol, both intra-domain and inter-domain handoff management have been designed to support smooth roaming in WMNs. In addition, we extend our work to Vehicular Mesh Networks (VMNs). Considering the characteristics of VMNs, a fast handoff scheme is introduced to reduce handoff latency by using a multi-hop clustering algorithm. Using this scheme, vehicle nodes are divided into different multi-hop clusters according to the relative mobility. Some vehicle nodes are selected as assistant nodes; and these assistant nodes will help the cluster head node to determine the next access router for minimizing handoff latency. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reduce handoff latency significantly.

Next-generation wireless networks have been envisioned to be an integration of heterogeneous wireless access networks such as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Networks) and the IEEE 802.11 based WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks). It is an important and challenging issue to support seamless vertical handoff management in such an integrated architecture that provides the mobile users uninterrupted service continuity anywhere, any time. In such a networking environment, the signaling delay of the vertical handoff is not fixed due to the traffic load in the backbone Internet, wireless channel quality and the distance between a mobile node and its home network. However, the currently handoff solutions implicitly considers the signaling delay as a constant value. In this thesis, we study a typical link layer assisted handoff, identifying its deficiency due to the considerably large handoff delay. We propose an adaptive vertical handoff management scheme for integrated UMTS and WLAN networks. The proposed scheme incorporates the idea of pre-handoff with adaptive handoff threshold. We estimate the handoff signaling delay in advance, therefore, providing the delay information required for making an adaptive handoff decision. Instead of setting a fixed threshold, an adaptive handoff threshold value is determined for every single MN based on the estimated handoff signaling delay. The RSS and the RSS's rate of change are used to determine the estimated handoff time instant. Extensive simulation has been conducted to verify the performance of the proposed handoff scheme.

The past few years have seen great increases in the use of portable devices like laptops, palmtops, etc. This has also led to the dramatic increase demand on wireless local area networks (WLAN) due to the flexibility and ease of use that it offers. Mobile IP and handover are important issues to be considered as these devices move within and between different networks and still have to maintain connectivity. It is, therefore, imperative to ensure seamless mobile IP handover for these devices as they move about. In this thesis we undertake a survey to describe the real processes involved in mobile IP handover in WLAN environment for different scenarios. Our work also identifies individual sources of delay during the handoff process, the sum total of which makes up the total latency. Other factors that could militate against the aim of having a seamless handoff in an inter-subnet network roaming were also considered as well as some proposed solutions. These factors are security, packet loss and triangle routing.

Next-generation wireless networks have been envisioned to be an integration of heterogeneous wireless access networks such as UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunication Networks) and the IEEE 802.11 based WLAN (Wireless Local Area Networks). It is an important and challenging issue to support seamless vertical handoff management in such an integrated architecture that provides the mobile users uninterrupted service continuity anywhere, any time. In such a networking environment, the signaling delay of the vertical handoff is not fixed due to the traffic load in the backbone Internet, wireless channel quality and the distance between a mobile node and its home network. However, the currently handoff solutions implicitly considers the signaling delay as a constant value. In this thesis, we study a typical link layer assisted handoff, identifying its deficiency due to the considerably large handoff delay. We propose an adaptive vertical handoff management scheme for integrated UMTS and WLAN networks. The proposed scheme incorporates the idea of pre-handoff with adaptive handoff threshold. We estimate the handoff signaling delay in advance, therefore, providing the delay information required for making an adaptive handoff decision. Instead of setting a fixed threshold, an adaptive handoff threshold value is determined for every single MN based on the estimated handoff signaling delay. The RSS and the RSS's rate of change are used to determine the estimated handoff time instant. Extensive simulation has been conducted to verify the performance of the proposed handoff scheme.

1x Evolution-Data Optimized Revision A (1xEV-DO Rev. A) is a cellular communications standard that introduces key enhancements to the high data rate packet switched 1xEV-DO Release 0 standard. The enhancements are driven by the increasing demand on some applications that are delay sensitive and require symmetric data rates on the uplink and the downlink. Some examples of such applications being video telephony and voice over internet protocol (VoIP). The handoff operation is critical for delay sensitive applications because the mobile station (MS) is not supposed to lose service for long periods of time. Therefore seamless server selection is used in Rev. A systems. This research analyzes the performance of this handoff technique. A theoretical approach is presented to calculate the slot error probability (SEP). The approach enables evaluating the effects of filtering, hysteresis as well as the system introduced delay to handoff execution. Unlike previous works, the model presented in this thesis considers multiple base stations (BS) and accounts for correlation of shadow fading affecting different signal powers received from different BSs. The theoretical results are then verified over ranges of parameters of practical interest using simulations, which are also used to evaluate the packet error rate (PER) and the number of handoffs per second. Results show that the SEP gives a good indication about the PER. Results also show that when considering practical handoff delays, moderately large filter constants are more efficient than smaller ones.

In mobile IP, a triangular routing problem usually leads to additional delays and non-seamless handoff, which causes the loss of a large amount of in-fly packets. In this thesis we propose an adaptive route optimization scheme that considers the seamless handoff and mobility rate. The proposed scheme adopts the mobile routing table scheme and includes an efficient cost function. The cost function is a trade-off between network bandwidth utilized by the routing path, signaling messages and processing loads of agents. The primary idea is to adaptively determine when to perform route optimization. The effect of the mobility rate and the cell sojourn time of a mobile node are studied. Both new call and handoff call are considered in the cost calculation. Simulation result shows that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the total cost composed of link and signaling costs.