Media Independent Handover Management in Heterogeneous Access Networks - An Empirical Evaluation

Abstract

The constant evolution on the telecommunications sector particularly with the increasing development of wireless technologies has led to the diversification of access networks solutions. Nowadays technologies like Wi-Fi, WiMAX, UMTS and LTE are a set of heterogeneous networks that provide mobile broadband access to multiple devices, from smartphones to laptops or tablets. This diversification alongside with the appearance of multi-technology terminals and user ubiquitous access requirements, brought enormous challenges to mobility management in heterogeneous network environments. To address this issue the IEEE group has been working on a standard in order to optimize mobility procedures through different access technologies, the IEEE802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) Services. The goal of this standard is to support and improve handovers regardless the access technology used by defining an abstraction layer called Media Independent Handover Function (MIHF) between Layer 3 and Layer 2 and below (MAC and PHY). This paper focuses on the performance of this framework by presenting an Enhanced Mobility Manager (EMM) entity capable of performing terminal and handover management using this framework. The EMM was deployed and tested in a real heterogeneous network environment providing Wi-Fi, WiMAX and HSPA networks access with IPv6 and MIPv6 support. To evaluate a real usage scenario a Android mobile device was used. The results show that IEEE 802.21 framework meets the proposed objectives by enabling both seamless handover between different Radio Access Technologies and QoS provisioning. This paper is organized as follows: Section II presents related work regarding the IEEE802.21 and mobility management developments, Section III briefly introduces the IEEE802.21 framework and its main goals. Section IV describes the proposed mobility management entity and how it can be integrated with the IEEE802.21 framework in order to control and execute handover procedures. Section V describes how the EMM was developed, how it works and presents the implemented testbed details. In Section VI the methodology used to perform the performance evaluation is presented and results are presented and discussed. Finally, Section VII presents the conclusions and future work possibilities.