SIP-based vertical handoff between WWANs and WLANs

Future-generation wireless networks have been envisioned as the integration of various wireless access networks, including both wireless wide area networks and wireless local area networks. In such a heterogeneous network environment, seamless mobility support is the basis of providing uninterrupted wireless services to mobile users roaming between various wireless access networks. Because of transparency to lower-layer characteristics, ease of deployment, and greater scalability, the application-layer-based session initiation protocol has been considered the right candidate for handling mobility in heterogeneous wireless networks. However, SIP entails application-layer transport and processing of messages, which may introduce considerable delay. As a case study of the performance of mobility management protocols in the heterogeneous wireless networks, we analyze the delay associated with vertical handoff using SIP in the WLAN-UMTS internetwork. Analytical results show that WLAN-to-UMTS handoff incurs unacceptable delay for supporting real-time multimedia services, and is mainly due to transmission of SIP signaling messages over erroneous and bandwidth-limited wireless links. On the other hand, UMTS-to-WLAN handoff experiences much less delay, mainly contributed by the processing delay of signaling messages at the WLAN gateways and servers. While the former case requires the deployment of soft handoff techniques to reduce the delay, faster servers and more efficient host configuration mechanisms can do the job in the latter case.