SIP-based mobility architecture for next generation wireless networks

Application-level protocol abstraction is required to support seamless mobility in next generation heterogeneous wireless networks. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) provides such an abstraction in providing mobility support in such networks. However, the handoff procedure with SIP suffers from undesirable delay and hence packet loss for some cases, which is detrimental to applications such as Voice over IP (VoIP) or streaming video with stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this paper we propose a SIP based architecture that supports soft handoff for IP centric wireless networks alleviating the problem of packet loss. The proposed architecture ensures that there is no packet loss and the end-to-end delay jitter is kept under control, thus maintaining two important parameters dictating the QoS for streaming multimedia applications.