Exploring Multi-homing Issues in Heterogeneous Environments

Mobile devices with two network interfaces(WiFi and 3G) are already commercially available. Point-to-point communications such as Infrared and Bluetooth are also readily used. In the near future, mobile phones will have several interfaces including satellite and new technologies such as Ultra wideband. Hence we must assume that such devices will be multi-homed by default. For various reasons, including network congestion, network resilience and increased endpoint bandwidth, there have been several attempts to address multi-homing. Heterogeneous environments with the need to support vertical handover introduce another set of issues which make the need to solve multi-homing problems more urgent. This paper outlines the issues, looks at past efforts and proposes a solution based on the Location Id/Node Id concept but also argues that additional support is needed to make such an approach efficient for heterogeneous environments.