An IEEE 802.21-based multihoming architecture for Make-Before-Break vertical handover

Multiple heterogeneous access technologies will be intergraded in the next generation wireless system in which the seamless migration of ongoing data-flows from one access point to another is one of the fundamental issues. In this paper, an IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) based handover management architecture containing four modules is proposed and the multihoming technology is adopted to achieve Make-Before-Break vertical handover. Then the paper presents the simulation of the architecture in ns-2. The results substantiate the efficacy of the architecture in improving the handover performance significantly compared with the traditional Mobile IPv6 (MIPv6) based Break-Before-Make handover scheme.