BlueMobile - a mobile IP based handoff system for Bluetooth, 802.11 and GPRS links

Ad-hoc networks using Bluetooth technology has gained immense popularity among the networking community. Nowadays electronic devices like cell phones come shipped with Bluetooth. Whereas Bluetooth technology has certain obvious advantages like low power consumption and reliable connection but it suffers some inherent problems including low area of operation, limit of 7 slave devices per master device. 802.11 technology on the other hand, has a wider area of operation and therefore very useful as access points and higher bandwidth to the order of 11 Mbps in 802.11b. But 802.11 have higher power consumption than Bluetooth. Cellular networks have a much wider coverage in geographical area than 802.11. Complementing Bluetooth with 802.11 and cellular network technology like GPRS would solve the shortcomings of these three technologies. With this idea we designed a handoff system called BlueMobile to integrate Bluetooth, 802.11 and GPRS technologies, by introduction of a simple extension to the already existing mobile IP implementation.