To drop or not to drop: On the impact of handovers on TCP performance

This paper presents a comparison between two handover schemes:
drop
and
forward
. In the
drop
scheme, packets received by the base station after the host has disconnected are dropped, whereas in the forward scheme these packets are forwarded to the new base station. We analyze various TCP flavors and compare our findings to simulation results. Our results can be used to determine which handover scheme and which TCP flavor should be employed to minimize the negative effect of handovers on TCP performance.