Heterogeneous network establishment assisted by cellular operators

In this paper, we describe a novel architecture to enable a secure communication among mobile devices using different wireless technologies like wireless LAN, Bluetooth, cellular systems or even infrared. Making use of the combination of these technologies for the data transmission and for the signaling of the communication, we analyze several scenarios with increasing complexity. The complete picture appears in the last scenario where all technologies are involved and the network is composed of heterogeneous mobile nodes. The paper also presents a solution for the setup of a secured communication channel (i.e. a Virtual Private Network connection) between several heterogeneous mobile nodes controlled by the cellular network operator. The mobile nodes can be either cellular aware or non-cellular aware in this framework. We propose to setup the heterogeneous network communications via the cellular network using the cellular aware nodes.