A Transport Layer Seamless Handover for Streaming Media in Wireless Overlapping Networks

Multimedia applications, such as streaming media, are bandwidth adaptive but have stringent jitter, delay and packet loss requirements. Especially during the user movement, packets may get lost and congested in the re-routing caused by handovers. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end Multi-path Adaptive Transmission Rate Adjustment Mechanism (MATRAM) for transport layer seamless handover for streaming media delivery in heterogeneous wireless networks with different amounts of available bandwidth from cell to cell. In addition, to support the proposed MATRAM, a new concurrent multi-path Stream Control Transmission Protocol (cmpSCTP) is proposed by us. The analysis verifies that the proposed MATRAM can efficiently optimize the handover process and enhance user-perceived video quality during handover.