Seamless SIP-based mobility for multimedia applications

Application-level protocol abstraction is required to support seamless mobility in next-generation heterogeneous wireless networks. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)provides the required abstraction for mobility support for multimedia applications in such networks. However, the handoff procedure with SIP suffers from undesirable delay and hence packet loss in some cases, which is detrimental to applications like voice over IP (VoIP) or streaming video that demand stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements. In this article we present a SIP-based architecture that supports soft handoff for IP-centric wireless networks. Soft handoff ensures that there is no packet loss and that the end-to-end delay jitter is kept under control. © 2006 IEEE.