A Receiver-Aided Seamless And Smooth Inter-RAT Handover At Layer-2

The future mobile networks consist of hyper-dense heterogeneous and small cell networks of same or different radio access technologies (RAT). Integrating mobile networks of different RATs to provide seamless and smooth mobility service will be the target of future mobile converged network. Generally, handover from high-speed networks to low-speed networks faces many challenges from application perspective, such as abrupt bandwidth variation, packet loss, round trip time variation, connection disruption, and transmission blackout. Existing inter-RAT handover solutions cannot solve all the problems at the same time. Based on the high-layer convergence sublayer design, a new receiver-aided soft inter-RAT handover is proposed. This soft handover scheme takes advantage of multihoming ability of multi-mode mobile station (MS) to smooth handover procedure. In addition, handover procedure is seamless and applicable to frequent handover scenarios. The simulation results conducted in UMTS-WiMAX converged network scenario show that: in case of TCP traffics for handover from WiMAX to UMTS, not only handover latency and packet loss are eliminated completely, but also abrupt bandwidth/wireless RTT variation is smoothed. These delightful features make this soft handover scheme be a reasonable candidate of mobility management for future mobile converged networks.