Vertical and horizontal handover in heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

Now days all Enterprises, Internet Service Providers, and Mobile Network Operators are all looking for cost-effective ways to move data ,voice and video amongst multiple, separate locations at broadband speeds. Fiber optics solutions often fall short due to up-front costs, recurring leases from telecommunications companies, and a lack of flexibility to scale with the operating organization. Broadband Wireless has emerged as a means to fill these gaps and to provide a lower total cost of ownership than wired solutions, while maintaining or exceeding the reliability and performance of those technologies. The IEEE 802.11 and IEEE 802.16 family of standards and its associated industry consortium, Wi-Fi and WiMAX, promises to deliver high data rates over large areas to a large number of users in the near future. This exciting addition to current broadband options such as DSL, Cable, and Wi-Fi promises to rapidly provide broadband access to locations in the world’s rural and developing areas where broadband is currently unavailable. The last decade has seen the exponential growth in the development of mobile applications. This has increased the demand on the wireless communication services. The capability to achieve wireless access anywhere, anytime, and anyplace has become common expectation as it provides significant flexibility and freedom in mobility. But to achieve global mobility in heterogeneous networks for any mobile device requires seamless connectivity using vertical handoff. Since none of the existing wireless frameworks provide practical solutions for vertical handoff. End-to- End Vertical Handoff or Always Best Connected concept proposed in this thesis offers a new concept to perform vertical handoff between heterogeneous wireless networks. To deliver network services without interruption, this concept present a novel design to monitor the network availability, it then picks the best accessible network for application layer. Since this approach relies only on existing technologies, deployed protocols, our approach can be easily implemented. In this thesis all the simulation results are obtained using OPNET Modeller 14.5. The results for different tested scenarios indicate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Future research activities will integrate several wireless technologies that are discussed in the thesis.