Design and implementation of an inter-domain TCP handover management method in ubiquitous WLANs

In the near future, many access points (APs) belonging to different IP subnets will become widespread and thus will be complementarily integrated to cover a wide area. In the wireless environment, common TCP connection-oriented communication has to be maintained when a mobile node (MN) moves across many APs with different IP subnets that causes a change in the IP address of the MN. Furthermore, TCP communication quality deeply depends on wireless link condition such as its own quality and the congestion caused by all WLAN devices in the vicinity. Thus, an MN needs to carefully determine the following operations related to handover: (1) start of handover operation, (2) selection of an optimal AP, and (3) efficient restart of the TCP communication. In our previous work, we proposed a TCP handover management method and performed detailed evaluation by simulation experiments. In this work, we implement the proposed method into a real operating system and confirm its practical use and effectiveness in a real environment through a preliminarily experiment.