A study of mobility management using IEEE 802.21

The evolution of mobile technologies had a major impact over the mobile services. The requests for multimedia services on portable devices are increasing continuously and they are becoming one of the main engines for the telecommunications industry. The heterogeneous wireless access technologies available on the mobile devices are an opportunity for the Mobile Network Operators to improve the quality for the services they provide. To take advantage of these opportunities IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) standard was introduced to optimize handover between heterogeneous IEEE 802 networks, and facilitate handover between IEEE 802 networks and cellular networks. In this paper an architecture built on the Media Independent Handover framework is presented, along with some aspects related to the implementation of the architecture modules in QualNet simulator. The paper focuses on the system functionalities evaluation based on experiments performed on a simulated MIH-enabled platform implemented in QualNet.