A MIH Services Based Application-Driven Vertical Handoff Scheme for Wireless Networks

Since the future wireless communication environments will contain various wireless access technologies, the provision of seamless mobility to vehicle across these heterogeneous networks is needed. In this paper, we propose an application-driven vertical handoff scheme which includes PMIPv6 handoff process by using IEEE 802.21 media independent handoff (MIH) services to provide seamless connectivity in heterogeneous wireless networks. Both the lower layers´ information of neighbor access networks obtained by MIH services and the QoS requirements of the application are compared to choose the most suitable candidate network for the application. In addition, our scheme put great emphasis on vehicle mobility consideration on handoff network selection due to the vehicle predominant characteristic of moving around dynamically.