A 802.11 MAC backoff mechanism for decreasing mobile IP handoff latency

In the Mobile IP, a mobile node movement can be detected from advertisements of foreign agents that differ from the previously received advertisements and the new care-of address is registered with the home agent. However, user packets are not forwarded to the new foreign agent until registration is completed and this interruption may degrade the quality of service especially in real-time applications such as audio transmission. For seamless connection, it is major problem to reduce handoff latency in the data-link layer during handoff. This paper proposes a scheme which reduces handoff latency during handoff and demonstrates the efficiency of its scheme by computer simulation. The proposed mechanism does not require any modifications to existing Mobile IP implementations but differentiates the handoff registration traffics and normal traffics at the MAC layer in IEEE 802.11 to speed up the handoff process.