End-to-End Mobility and Robust IP Soft Handover

We describe the design and implementation of a new transport layer protocol MMSP (Mobile Multimedia Streaming Protocol) that realizes end-to-end mobility and robust IP soft handover; its target is to greatly increase the quality of multimedia streaming applications over wireless networks. We address two main causes of quality degradation in the mobile environment. One is the frequent movement of mobile terminals between radio access points. The other is the inherently high bit error rates of wireless links. MMSP supports multihoming and bicasting in combination with FEC. These mechanisms enable mobile terminals to move without any data loss and also improve error resiliency against wireless errors. Implementing the architecture requires no changes to the existing IP networks so it allows for easy deployment. Our performance experiments show that while FEC processing causes some slight delay, such delay is allowable and bicasting with FEC can provide high quality multimedia streaming even under high bit error rates.