Seamless Vertical Handover for Efficient Mobility Management in Cooperative Heterogeneous Networks

The inter-networking cooperation among different wireless networks will help the operators to improve the overall throughput and resource utilization of the wireless networks. During this inter-networking, a mobile node switches among various access networks to satisfy QoS as well as QoE. The next-generation networks require seamless handover among different networks to maintain the connection. In future wireless networks, a mobile node with a multi-interface may have network access from separate service providers using different protocols. Thus, with this heterogeneity environment, spectrum handover decision making must be introduced to take benefit of cooperative support for handover and mobility management in heterogeneous networks. In first stage, an extensive review of the heterogeneous network environment and vertical handover is presented. In second stage, system functionalities and spectrum switching decision making for the vertical handover process are explained. In third stage, architecture and the simulation testbed used for system validation and implementation of the system modules in QualNet simulator are presented.