Performance analysis of mobility in 3G cellular UMTS and WLAN networks

Mobility regarded from a Quality of Service (QoS) point of view can be provided by future wireless access technologies with an efficient management of the handover process. The aim of this work is to present a comparative analysis of handover mechanisms in 3G access technology UMTS, Wireless LAN 802.11-g, as well as in proposed hybrid integrated architecture UMTS-WLAN, in terms of QoS parameters: delay, jitter, throughput and packet loss. The obtained results should be useful considering that future unified architectures aim at integrating different types of access architectures for overall better performance.