Network layer soft handoff for IP mobility

We present an empirical evaluation of network-layer soft handoff for IP mobility. Such functionality is not currently available for Mobile IP. Our new approach, based on the Identifier Locator Network Protocol (ILNP), requires no additional network entities, such as proxies, and it does not require modification of any routing protocols. Only the communicating hosts need to have their end-system protocol stacks updated so it is incrementally deployable. In our performance evaluation, we find that soft handoff minimises packet loss, with the observed packet loss during handoff being no worse than the natural loss of the end-to-end path.