Handover approaches for seamless mobility management in next generation wireless networks

  • Authors:

  • Linoh A. Magagula;H. Anthony Chan;Olabisi E. Falowo

  • Affiliations:

  • (Member, IEEE.) University of Cape Town, Department of Electrical Engineering, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa;(Member, FIEEE) Huawei Technologies, 1700 Alma Drive, Plato, Texas 75093, U.S.A;(Member, IEEE) University of Cape Town, Department of Electrical Engineering, Rondebosch 7701, South Africa

  • Venue:
  • Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Next generation wireless networks (NGWN) will be an integration of heterogeneous wireless access networks that will interwork over an IP-based infrastructure. This all-IP vision has led to the development of handover mechanisms to support seamless mobility for active network services among the different interworking wireless networks in order to ensure network access ubiquity in NGWN. These handover mechanisms need to ensure that mobile devices continue to receive ongoing communication without any noticeable disruption during handover events among the heterogeneous networks. This paper gives a qualitative and quantitative review of current handover approaches of IP mobility management protocols for NGWN with an objective to introduce a new way of further optimizing the handover performance. In particular, the paper focuses on handover approaches of mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) based mobility management protocols. Thus, the need, benefits, and limitations of these handover approaches are explored. Thereafter, dynamic handover coordination is introduced as a new viable solution that exploits the benefits and mitigates the limitations of these handover approaches hence improving handover performance in terms of handover delay, packet loss, and signaling overhead. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.