Seamless soft handoff protocols

In Future Force battlefield networks service reliability and availability are key performance indicators. To achieve high reliability in a mobile environment is not an easy task, as frequent node movement combined with volatile RF environment often results in fluctuation in link quality. The convergence time in a mobile ad hoc network is prohibitively long to ensure high reliability. To combat this, innovative seamless soft handoff approaches must be developed to achieve the required reliability requirements. To the best of our knowledge, there is no seamless soft handoff protocol for tactical mobile ad hoc networks. To create a truly seamless soft handoff protocol, San Diego Research Center (SDRC) and Telcordia Technologies proposed in Phase I an innovative distributed, seamless multi-layer soft handoff protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. Simulation and analysis were conducted to compare the performance of candidate protocol architectures qualitatively and quantitatively. Based on these studies, we selected a multi-layer soft handoff protocol, MLSHO-2, as our candidate protocol. In Phase II, we will implement MLSHO-2 and demonstrate the real-world performance improvements in a laboratory environment on COTS and/or custom routers. Our demonstration will leverage the PILSNER environment as much as possible to ensure smooth transition to WIN-T.