Cross-Layer Enhanced Mobility Management in Heterogeneous Networks

The criteria used by state-of-the-art mobility protocols in their handover decision-making are very limited. The protocols typically rely on routing advertisements or signal strength measurements in mobility detection but these criteria fail to reflect the actual transmission conditions in the networks. Instead, more extensive information originating from both the mobile node´s local stack and the network should be employed to achieve more informed handover decision-making. This paper introduces a framework and a prototype implementation for improving the handover performance of Mobile IP based on a variety of cross-layer and cross-domain triggers. The paper also presents the first results obtained from testing the prototype that show the usefulness of the approach.