HANDOFF PERFORMANCE ENHANCEMENT IN WIRELESS OVERLAY NETWORKS

摘要

Mobile devices are now equipped with multiple wireless interfaces. With the coexistence of diverse wireless ac-cess technologies, mobile users may be connected to any network according to available agreements and its profile. This ubiquity is a special feature of next-generation or 4G wireless networks (NGWN/4G). In this context, appropriate mobility management, integration and interworking of existing wireless systems are crucial. Several proposals are available in the literature to solve those issues. However, these proposals are not able to guarantee seamless roaming and service continuity. This paper proposes an efficient handoff protocol based on localized mobility management, access network discovery, context transfer and fast handoff concepts, called Handoff Protocol for Integrated Networks (HPIN), that alleviates service disruption during handoff in IPv6-based heterogeneous wireless environments. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed HPIN performs better in terms of signaling cost, handoff latency and packet loss compared to existing schemes.