Mobility between infrastructure and Ad-Hoc environments: Experimental validation

In the field of next generation networks, the user´s request for ubiquitous access has become paramount in powering the development and integration of new access technologies, thus increasing the support of ad-hoc networks as extension of infrastructure operator networks. In this paper we introduce the integration of Ad-Hoc networks in the mobility architecture of the IST Daidalos II project, whose goal is to provide the seamless mobility of nodes between different access technologies. Here we will focus on the mobility architecture of ad-hoc networks and the movement of nodes, while still providing them with the infrastructured features. To help accomplish this goal, concepts like the IEEE 802.21 and NetLMM are used and extended to support and integrate mobility in mobile ad-hoc networks. We also present the testbed implementation of this architecture and the experimental results. We show that the majority of the time spent in the handover is consumed firstly, in the scanning of the wireless environment for possible destination networks, and secondly in the ad-hoc procedures. We also show that there is a network breakpoint for both losses and delay, beyond which they become too large for normal communications.