• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.10
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• pp.4015-4033
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• 2015

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.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.442-450
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• 2006

Inter-operability between heterogeneous radio access technologies (RATs), in the sense of seamless vertical han-dover (VHO) support with common radio resource management (CRRM) functionalities, has recently attracted a significant research attention and has become a prominent issue in standardization fora. In this paper, we formulate the problem of load balancing between cooperative RAT's as a mathematical program and by trading off a pre-defined delay tolerance per request we propose a vertical handover batch processing (VHBP) scheme. To quantify the performance of the proposed VHBP scheme we compare it with a baseline processing scheme, where each VHO request is processed independently under a number of different network scenarios. Numerical investigations reveal significant net benefits of the proposed scheme compared with the baseline, both in terms of achieved load balancing levels but also with regard to the acceptance rate of the VHO requests.