A novel method of association based service handover in broadcast networks

Current broadcast networks such as digital video broadcasting for handheld (DVB-H) do not provide a direct approach for handovers but rely on a bidirectional mobile network such as universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) for the handover. In this paper, we present a novel method which can be used for handover without the support of a bi-directional mobile network. Furthermore, our method can also be used for associating services between broadcast and non-broadcast networks. In this article we compare this novel method with existing methods of service delivery. We demonstrate the efficiency of this method by comparing the overhead in a DVB-H network. Furthermore, we apply our method in the convergence of DVB-H and multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) to achieve a seamless service handover by associating the services between these two networks. The simulation results demonstrate the improvements in the setup delay time for different burst sizes and bitrates while transferring the service from one network to another.