Evaluation of discovery mechanisms for Media Independent Handover services

The proliferation of mobile terminals coupled with multiple wireless interfaces has created complex scenarios where network operators need to provide connectivity in heterogeneous environments. To facilitate handover procedures in these scenarios, the 802.21 standard has been specified, providing Media Independent Handover (MIH) services allowing control and information gathering from different access interfaces. However, accessing these procedures requires the discovery of supporting nodes and their capabilities. This paper provides a description and performance comparison of different available MIH discovery schemes and proposes a novel local discovery procedure for automatically detecting link interfaces in MIH-enabled entities, showing by evaluation that its deployment increases performance and requires less information exchange.