Evaluation of a pastry-based P2P overlay for supporting vertical handover

Vertical handovers (VHO) are expected to be a key feature in beyond 3G (B3G) networks. This paper presents and evaluates a Pastry-based P2P overlay network for supporting vertical handover in B3G networks. The P2P overlay is used to quickly locate attachment points (APs) for mobile entities and to retrieve rapidly the configuration and coverage information of these APs. The advantage of the P2P-based solution is its distributed nature, its scalability, and its self-organizing capability. The performance of the P2P-based VHO support architecture is evaluated in terms of the search time for APs, the scalability of the algorithm, and for homogenous and heterogeneous network layouts. In addition, the solution is compared with the conventional client-server approach