Challenges and Solutions for Handoff Issues in 4G Wireless Systems An Overview

As the wireless communications technologies evolve dramatically, the recent research focus has shifted to the development of fourth-generation (4G) mobile systems. Instead of developing a new uniform standard for all wireless communications systems, 4G communication networks strive to seamlessly integrate various existing wireless communication technologies. One of the major challenges in this migration is to realize seamless handoffs among various communications systems with small handoff latency and packet loss. In this paper, we give a survey on existing handoff schemes for IP-Based 4G mobile networks. Specifically, we describe three handover algorithms, Mobile IPv6 protocol, Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 protocol, and IDMP-based fast handoffs. In addition, we compare these handover schemes at the end.