Soft handover and routing mechanisms for mobile devices

We introduce mechanisms, which offer soft handover support between two different IP subnets for the mobile devices. The mobility support protocol that was developed tries to solve the same problem as mobile IP, that is, how to manage up to date information about the location of a moving node and to keep its connections established during its movement. It uses soft handover and relies on accurate routing information of routers participating in the protocol. The protocol works entirely in user space (layer 7, 6 and 5 of the OSI model) and considers the handover only in layer 3.