Statistical Performance Analysis of the Predictive Fast and Seamless Handoff Scheme for the Nested Mobile Network

In the past, our proposed HCoP-B has achieved route optimization and resolved the RO-storm problem for handoffs of the nested mobile network. However, because HCoPB was a pure layer three, i.e., network layer, approach which handoff operations were performed after the layer two, i.e., data link layer, link breaks, it still suffered from a long handoff latency and serious packet losses. In this paper, by adopting the handoff prediction concept of the fast mobile IPv6 on HCoP-B, we proposed a cross-layer architecture, which was called the fast HCoP-B (FHCoP-B), to trigger layer three HCoPB route optimization flow by 802.11 and 802.16 link events before the actual Layer 2 handoff occurs. In this way, FHCoP-B further shortened both the handoff latency and packet losses of HCoP-B. We further adopted the analytical model to investigate handoff latencies and total buffer sizes of HCoP-B, FHCoP-B and two well-known NEMO schemes with the radio link protocol, which could detect packet losses and performs retransmissions over the error-prone wireless link. Hence, FHCoP-B outperformed the other three schemes by achieving shortest handoff latencies, the smallest numbers of packet losses and the least total handoff costs during handoff with little extra buffers. Consequently, it exhibited significant benefits on supporting fast and seamless handoff in the nested mobile network even over error-prone wireless links.