Handoff Between a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and a Wide Area Network (UMTS)

Abstract

With the appea rance of wire less data networks with variable cove rage, band width and handoff stra te gies, in addi tion to the growing need of mobile nodes to freely roam among these networks, the support of an inte ro pe rable handoff stra tegy for hybrid wire less data networks is a requi re ment that needs to be addressed. The current trend in wire less data networks is to offer multi media access to mobile users by emplo ying the wire less local area network (WLAN) stan dard IEEE802.11 while the user is located indoors; on the other hand, 3 rd gene ra tion wire less networks (WAN) are being deployed to provide cove rage while the user is located outdoors. As a result, the mobile node will require a handoff mecha nism to allow the user to roam between WLAN and WAN envi ron ments; up to this date several stra te gies have been proposed (Sattari et al., 2004 andHyoJin, 2007) in the lite ra ture, however, none of these have been stan dar dized to date. To support this inte ro pe ra bi lity, the mobile node must be equipped with confi gu rable wire less inter faces to support the handoff between the WLAN and the WAN networks. In this work a new algo rithm is proposed to allow a mobile node to roam between a wire less local area network (IEEE802.11) and a WAN base station (UMTS), while emplo ying IP mobi lity support. The algo rithm is imple mented in simulation, using the Network Simulator 2. Keywords: Handoff, WLAN, UMTS, Mobile IP (MIP). Resumen