Internet protocol (IP)-based mobile systems are ushering new and faster technologies in wireless mobile networking. Therefore, the expectations from these network services with respect to data transfer rate and quality of service (QoS) are high. As such, meeting these requirements is the recent trend in modern wireless technologies. An important aspect regarding such improvements is the modification of handoff schemes between different networks. In this paper, we are focusing on the recent trends based on seamless handoff scheme in heterogeneous networks such as worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) and long term evolution (LTE). The development of the session initiation protocol (SIP) Prior-INVITE scheme is an improvement on the earlier used SIP Re-INVITE method, which comes a long way in decreasing the average handoff delay. The performance analysis using software simulation on account of various parameters, such as handoff delay, cost of signaling and packet loss rate are accomplished in this work. The performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme outperforms the ordinary cross-layer scheme and noncross-layer scheme in a vertical handover scenario.
