A solution for changing the communication interfaces between WiFi and 3G without packet loss

摘要

The Internet Protocol (both IPv4 and IPv6) technology uses the IP address of the network interface as the identification of the communication session. The consequence of this idea is that the breakdown of the interface will also stop the communication session, even when other network interface cards would be available for the communication. Many of the currently used end devices (laptops, tablets, mobile phones) have usually more than one network interface cards (e.g. RJ-45, WiFi, 3G), which could be used for redundancy purposes. In this paper we investigate a software tool (named MPT library) which offers a solution in the Network Layer for keeping the communication session in the case of interface breakdown. We performed measurements in different business network environments for changing the WiFi and 3G network interfaces inside a communication session without losing a packet. These results confirm that the MPT multipath communication library can be used efficiently as a solution for the mentioned situation.