Abstract

SANCHEZ-GARCIA, J; VILLASENOR-GONZALEZ, Luis A; VAQUERA-FLORES, Mario E  and  AQUINO-SANTOS, Raúl. Handoff Between a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and a Wide Area Network (UMTS). Ing. invest. y tecnol. [online]. 2009, vol.10, n.2, pp.167-184. ISSN 2594-0732.

With the appearance of wireless data networks with variable coverage, band width and handoff strategies, in addition to the growing need of mobile nodes to freely roam among these networks, the support of an interoperable handoff strategy for hybrid wireless data networks is a requirement that needs to be addressed. The current trend in wireless data networks is to offer multimedia access to mobile users by employing the wireless local area network (WLAN) standard IEEE802.11 while the user is located indoors; on the other hand, 3^rd generation wireless networks (WAN) are being deployed to provide coverage while the user is located outdoors. As a result, the mobile node will require a handoff mechanism to allow the user to roam between WLAN and WAN environments; up to this date several strategies have been proposed (Sattari et al., 2004 and HyoJin, 2007) in the literature, however, none of these have been standardized to date. To support this interoperability, the mobile node must be equipped with configurable wireless inetrfaces to support the handoff between the WLAN and the WAN networks. In this work a new algorithm is proposed to allow a mobile node to roam between a wireless local area network (IEEE802.11) and a WAN base station (UMTS), while employing IP mobility support. The algorithm is implemented in simulation, using the Network Simulator 2.

Keywords : Handoff; WLAN; UMTS; Mobile IP (MIP).

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