Cross-Layer Design and Analysis of Wireless Profiled TCP for Vertical Handover

In this paper, the authors consider downward and upward vertical handovers in integrated wireless LAN and cellular networks, and address Wireless Profiled TCP premature timeouts due to steep increase of round-trip time and false fast retransmit due to packet reordering. Specifically, they develop a mobile receiver centric loosely coupled cross-layer design, which is easy to implement and deploy, backward compatible with the Wireless Application Protocol version 2 (WAP 2.0) architecture, and robust in the absence of cross-layer information.