Handover in a Virtual Cellular Network

A Virtual Cellular Network (VCN) [1] is a wireless cellular network wherein a single Mobile Station (MS) can be in simultaneous communication with more than one Base Station (BS). This paper presents the implementation of a handover protocol for a virtual cellular network. The proposed handover protocol is used in combination with a link protocol [2] and a multiple-access protocol [3]. The design of the protocol is one of the contributions to the multidisciplinary Mobile Multimedia Communications (MMC) project at Delft University of Technology. The targets include 155 Megabit per second sustained throughput for high-level users, support for inexpensive mobile stations and support for the Internet Protocol (IP), as well as an option for Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM).