An Interworking Architecture for Heterogeneous IP Wireless Networks

Abstract

A major trend in next generation or 4G wireless networks (NGWN/4G) is the coexistence of diverse but complementary architectures and wireless access technologies. In this context, an appropriate integration and interworking of existing wireless systems are crucial. Interworking architectures have been proposed for 3G cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLAN) by both third generation wireless initiatives, 3GPP and 3GPP2. However, proposed interworking architectures still to be hindered by some drawbacks, the most significant being the absence of quality of service (QoS) guarantee and seamless roaming. This paper proposes a novel architecture, called <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Integrated</i> <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">InterSystem</i> <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Architecture</i> (USA), based on 3GPP/3GPP2 proposal, which enables the integration and interworking of various wireless networks and hide their heterogeneities from each other. The USA architecture aims at providing guaranteed seamless roaming and service continuity across different access networks. Numerical results show that USA with its supported handoff management scheme provides better performance than existing interworking architectures when they use traditional IPv6-based handoff management schemes.