Mobility Management of VoIP Services Using SCTP Handoff Mechanism

Voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) is a prevalent multimedia application nowadays. For mobile nodes (MNs) using VoIP services in wireless networks, the handoff issues need to be taken into account. Stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) is a potential transport layer protocol with multi-homing and multi-streaming functions. Mobile SCTP with dynamic address reconfiguration (DAR) extends SCTP to mobile wireless network. In this paper, we design and implement a handoff mechanism using multi-homing, DAR and partially reliable SCTP (PR-SCTP) of mobile SCTP to transport VoIP applications. The switch from UDP or TCP to SCTP for VoIP transport provides the seamless handoff ability for MNs using real-time applications such as VoIP service. This paper also provides the performance analyses of the proposed scheme on the implemented Linux testbed.