Predictive L3 handover in IEEE 802.16 vehicular 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 mobile WiMAX environment. Prediction is achieved by 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 are able to occur prior to start of layer-2 handover procedure, and therefore, total handover latency and service disruption time can be reduced. The experiments conducted with system parameters and propagation model defined by WiMAX Forum demonstrate that the proposed method predicts the future signal level accurately and reduces the total handover latency and packet drop probabilities.