A new vertical handover mechanism for convergence of wired and wireless access networks

This paper proposes a vertical handover mechanism for mobile devices to keep connection with the Internet in wired and wireless coexistence networks. To support vertical handover between two heterogeneous access networks, the intermediate driver including a virtual mini-port driver and a virtual protocol driver is developed newly. Then, an actual IP address is assigned to the virtual mini-port driver. In addition, the intermediate driver includes the media independent handover (MIH) function of IEEE 802.21 standards group for efficient converging of two heterogeneous adapters. When communication via the running adapter gets disconnected while in service, the disconnection of the running adapter is automatically detected by the MIH function and then handover occurs by mapping information on the other adapter to the virtual adapter. Using the proposed handover mechanism, the session can be continued seamlessly even when handover between heterogeneous network adapters occurs at lower level in Internet applications. To evaluate the proposed handover mechanism, actual experiments are performed for wired and wireless coexistence networks using various Internet applications, and then their results are discussed.