General approaches for implementing seamless handover

Abstract

Seamless handover is a fundamental concern in any system with mobility. It is the attempt to provide a given QoS also during the process of migration from one domain (e.g. served by an access point) to another. Its major goal is to hide from the application (or user) any difference between the normal service offered within a domain and during a migration.In this paper we characterize the notion of "seamless handover" in a general framework, identify the fundamental problems, discuss different aspects of this notion, and give a taxonomy of possible approaches to achieve it. We also review concrete examples in mobile computing and mobile computation, map these approaches to our classification and propose a unified architectural framework for implementing seamless handover.