An infrastructure-based approach for fast and seamless handover

Most important frameworks supporting mobile communications are not capable of meeting real-time application requirements due to the service degradation appearing during the handover process. This degradation is noticed by the application as an excessive service blocking time and a non-negligible packet loss rate. The reasons of this degradation are: slow procedures for address allocation, too much packets exchanged by signaling procedures, and the delay required to establish a new end-to-end delivery path. Although these problems have been widely analyzed, and a number of solutions have been proposed, better handover performances are still needed. In this paper, we propose the introduction of some functionalities into access point equipments to improve the handover performances. These functionalities are based on the reduction of both the address allocation delay and the number of exchanged signaling packets, as well as the parallel execution of certain procedures. Our approach is implemented over the signaling mechanism of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) in such a way that the proposed functionalities can be used by means of extended options.