Smooth Adaptive Soft Handover Algorithm for Multimedia Streaming over Wireless Networks

Inter-network mobility is achieved by allowing a mobile node to change its point of attachment to the network while preserving connectivity to its corresponding nodes. Most handover solutions proposed in the literature directly change the whole data flow from one network to another relying on only one network to transfer the entire data stream. These solutions involve a certain amount of quality degradation due to increasing loss and delay and suffer in terms of scalability, efficient resource allocation and resilience to different mobile node speeds. This paper proposes the smooth adaptive soft-handover algorithm (SASHA) which increases the quality of the multimedia delivery process when performing handover in heterogeneous wireless environment by gracefully transferring the load from one connection to the other.