Implementation of the Event Service of Media Independent Handover for Wi-Fi in ns-3

Abstract

There are a number of heterogeneous wireless networks available these days and hence, more network interfaces are being integrated into mobile devices by their manufacturers. Furthermore, there has been an increased use of multimedia applications in recent times. This increase in the usage and the availability of multiple broadband access mechanisms make it necessary to have seamless handovers across different wireless technologies that don’t disrupt user sessions. Handover solutions should also allow handover policies to be defined by service providers, application providers, and other entities based on operational and business requirements. IEEE 802.21 provides a Media Independent Handover (MIH) framework in order to facilitate seamless handovers between heterogeneous networks based on the capabilities of the available networks and current link conditions. However, IEEE 802.21 does not actually deal with the execution of handovers or the handover policies. The implementation of MIH in ns-3 had been started a while ago but had come to a standstill. This paper presents the implementation of the event service of MIH for Wi-Fi and a basic handover policy using the information provided by these events. Our experiments show that taking handover decisions using MIH leads to reduction in packet drops and hence, better overall throughput.