An application-level approach for seamless mobility support across heterogeneous networks

The growth in variety of wireless networks along with the popularization of the terminals with multi-radio interfaces offers the opportunity and power to make better user experience with the coexistence of diverse but complementary access technologies. The appropriate mobility management scheme enabling the service continuity is crucial in such environment. Great efforts available in the literature and the industrial standards have been taken to solve this issue. Most of them however encounter the challenges in the deployment and implementation given the legacy networks. This paper proposes an application-level approach for mobility support across the heterogeneous networks in the context of Hyper Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Our solution introduces no framework-level modification on the existing systems except for the requirement that the IP communication be enabled. The experimental results show that our proposal provides the smooth inter-network handover as well as the higher throughput than the original HTTP.