An MIH-assisted handoff mechanism for concurrent multipath transfer in wireless multihomed networks

As more and more devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces, the multihomed technology is becoming an important technology that can provide more reliable connections against the network failure and better data transmission rate. Concurrent Multipath Transfer (CMT), which is based on SCTP, is devised for multihomed networks. CMT can transmit data over all paths to maximum the data transmission speed. One of the main concerns of CMT is the receiver buffer blocking issue, especially in multihomed wireless mobile networks. If the receiver buffer is blocked, the sender can send only one packet to the receiver. The receiver buffer blocking is mainly caused by the lost data. For small memory devices, e.g., PDA, smart phone and embedded systems, the receiver buffer is limited and has less free space to prevent receiver buffer blocking. In this paper, we proposed Media Independent Handover - Concurrent Multipath Transfer (MIH-CMT) over wireless networks to deal with the receiver buffer blocking caused by handoff loss. MIH-CMT can reduce the amount of packet loss during handoff, which may lead to the receiver buffer blocking. Simulation results show that MIH-CMT can reduce the effect of the receiver buffer blocking effectively for devices that have smaller buffer size.