Enhanced Media Independent Handover Framework

The Internet access paradigm is changing and a wide range of overlapping radio access technologies, such as WiMAX, Wi-Fi, 3GPP UMTS/LTE and DVB-H, will soon be available to most users and their multi-access devices. Therefore, novel mechanisms and protocols are needed to provide seamless mobility between different wireless access technologies. This paper presents novel handover procedures, based on media independent schemes, to address seamless mobility in heterogeneous environments. We propose an enhanced Media Independent Handover Framework (eMIHF), which extends IEEE 802.21 by allowing for efficient provisioning and activation of QoS resources in the target radio access technology during the handover preparation phase, and efficiently interacts with the mobility processes of different technologies employed. We evaluate eMIHF using the ns-2 simulator, and demonstrate that the proposed handover scheme provides seamless mobility, with low latency and no packet loss.