A cross-layer mobility management scheme based on time series analysis in IEEE802.16 networks

With the fast proliferation of the mobile Internet, the wireless community has been increasingly looking for a framework that can provide seamless mobility. In this paper, we propose a fast cross-layer handover scheme based on movement prediction in the Mobile WiMAX environment. Prediction is achieved via the auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA(p,d,q)) model. The orders of the model parameters are estimated from the signal strength samples of mobile users. By utilizing signal strength prediction, layer-3 handover activities can occur prior to starting the layer-2 handover procedure, and therefore, the total handover latency and service disruption time can be reduced. The experiments conducted according to the system parameters and propagation model defined by WiMAX Forum prove that the proposed method predicts the future signal level accurately and reduces the total handover latency and packet drop probabilities.