Media-Independent Handover Design for Seamless Mobility in Heterogeneous WiMAX/Wi-Fi Networks

As we are moving toward next generation wireless networks, we are facing the integration of heterogeneous access networks. The main challenge is to provide mobile users moving freely across different radio access technologies with satisfactory quality of services for a variety of applications. Consequently, the seamless roaming over heterogeneous networks is an important concern. To minimize the disruption to the ongoing session when a mobile user is moving from one access network to another, we propose a framework that integrates IEEE 802.11 WLANs and IEEE 802.16 WMANs based on the IEEE 802.21, so-called Media Independent Handover (MIH), to facilitate both homogeneous and heterogeneous handovers. Both numerical analysis and simulation results show that seamless roaming between WLAN and WMAN can be achieved and much better performance can be obtained compared with the IEEE 802.21 standard approach. key words: media independent handover, mobility, heterogeneous networks, mobile IP, WiMAX