A middleware architecture supporting seamless and secure multimedia services across an intertechnology radio access network

This article presents a middleware architecture to support multimedia services across intertechnology radio access networks in a secure and seamless manner. The proposed architecture uses the media-independent handover framework, where the handover decision function is based on triggering/collecting statistics from the physical, network, and application layers so that an ongoing multimedia session (video) can be transferred seamlessly and securely (using context transfer) across intertechnology radio access networks. Simulation results show that when a vertical handover is based on the proposed MIH framework (including the context transfer of AAA information), handover latency is reduced by 38 percent during WiFi to UMTS handover and 20 percent during UMTS to WiFi handover compared to a non-MIH-based handover scheme.