Streaming multimedia over wireless networks is a challenging task. Extensive research has been carried out to ensure a smooth and uninterrupted multimedia transmission to a Mobile Host (MH) over wireless media. The current research thrust is to ensure an uninterrupted multimedia transmission when the MH moves between networks or subnets. Ensuring uninterrupted multimedia transmission during handoff is challenging, because the MH is already receiving multimedia from the network to which it is connected; when it moves into another network, it needs to break the connection with the old network and establish a connection with the new network. TCP/IP is not support for this so that Mobile IP and SIGMA are handoff schemes are using at the network layer and the transport layer respectively. SIGMA is based on IP diversity and aims to improve the handoff performance over Mobile IP by reducing the handoff latency. In this paper we compared the performance of the handoff schemes in an experimental test bed. Results show that SIGMA has a lower handoff latency when compared to Mobile IP. Moreover, SIGMA can achieve a seamless handoff between two subnets.

Keywords: Hand off Latency, MIP, SIGMA, Throughput, packet trace and RTT,