Quality-of-Service Architecture supporting Anticipated Handovers in IP-based Mobile Networks

Quality-of-Service (QoS) in wireless environments. When performing a handover, request and allocation of resources have to be performed in the shortest possible time to avoid disruptions for the user service. Therefore, it is preferable to ensure resource availability in advance, which we call anticipated handover. This article provides an overview of a comprehensive QoS architecture supporting such handovers. The presented architecture and protocol were implemented and evaluated by measurements. They show that anticipated handovers not only outperform hard handovers regarding handover latency, but that they also provide functional and robustness advantages.