Existing mobility systems such as Mobile IP or TCP Migrate propagate address binding updates (BUs) all the way to a HA or CH. As a result, a potentially large number of packets may be in flight when the path latency from the MH to the HA or CH is high. If the MH stops receiving packets at the old IP address before starting to receive packets at the new address (cold switch), then those in-flight packets will be lost.
With ROAM, end-hosts can alleviate this problem by choosing indirection
points (i.e., triggers) that map onto nearby 
servers. Since the
number of packets that are lost during a cold-switch is proportional
to the delay between the MH and the indirection point, this choice
will reduce packet loss. In Section 7.2.2, we use
experiments to compare the performances of ROAM and MIPv6 with
cold-switching. See section 2 for a qualitative
comparison of our approach to two recently proposed mechanisms to
increase the performance of handoff in MIPv4 and
MIPv6 [12,13].