A IP Layer Soft-handover Approach for All-IP Wireless Networks

Generally handover can be divided into two kinds, hard handover and soft handover, according to the connection situation with the base station. In the overlapped coverage area, while hard handover will cause more packet lost and handover cost, and soft handover can provide seamless handover performance. The soft handover can be implemented either in link layer or network layer. A novel IP layer packet diversity and error resiliency method is introduced. And the network structure to deploy this scheme is described. The initial analysis result indicates that the IP layer soft handover scheme can provide better performance than hard handover in overlapped coverage by heterogeneous networks