BANGALORE, INDIA: 'Handoff' has become a common problem today, especially since mobile phones and WiFi are being used so aggressively.

"When a user moves out of one transmitter’s range and into another’s, the network has to perform a 'handoff', according to MIT News.

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However due to the large number of scattered transmitters the Handoff process does not happen the way it is supposed to.

A group of MIT researchers have come out with a set of new communications protocols that use of built-in motion sensors, such as GPS receivers, accelerometers and, increasingly, gyros, to improve Handoff.

And in the process of experimenting it on MIT’s campus, they were able to improve network throughput (the amount of information that devices could send and receive in a given period) by about 50 percent.

The MIT researchers — graduate student Lenin Ravindranath, Professor Hari Balakrishnan, Associate Professor Sam Madden, and postdoctoral associate Calvin Newport, all of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — used motion detection to improve four distinct communications protocols.

"One governs the smart phone’s selection of the nearest transmitter. The new protocol selects an access point on the basis of the user’s inferred trajectory, explains Balakrishnan.

"In their experiments, the MIT researchers found that, with one version of their protocol, a moving cell phone would have to switch transmitters 40 percent less frequently than it would with existing protocols. A variation of the protocol improved throughput by about 30 percent," adds the report.

Another of the protocols governs a phone’s selection of bit rate, or the rate at which it sends and receives information.

A third protocol governs the behaviour of wireless base stations rather than devices that connect to them. The fourth protocol uses motion data to determine routing procedures for networks of wirelessly connected cars, whose relative positions are constantly changing, adds the report.