OpenMIH, an Open-Source Media-Independent Handover Implementation and Its Application to Proactive pre-Authentication

Enabling a seamless experience for mobile users while dealing with multi-access networks is a great challenge for wireless access providers. Towards this goal, the IEEE 802.21 Working Group is elaborating the needed mechanisms and the standardization effort has led to a Media Independent Handover Services (MIHS) framework that is now ready for deployment. However, no public implementation of those mechanisms is available yet. This paper presents OpenMIH, an implementation of MIHS and an illustrative scenario for proactive pre-authentication using off-the-shelf components for authentication. In particular, it demonstrates how network selection and handover preparation can be leveraged by such an implementation.