Fast Seamless Secure Handoff for Loosely Coupled Systems in Heterogeneous Wireless Mobile Networks

For accessing various resources via mobile device anytime anywhere, the heterogeneous access technologies between wired and wireless networks have been developed and integrated actively. However, real-time services, e.g., Voice over IP (VoIP) and video streaming suffer from long delay, and non-real-time connections, e.g., TCP connections, cause low transmission throughput while occurring timeout and high packet loss rate. This paper thus proposes a hierarchical mobility management structure (FSSH) to achieve fast, seamless, secure handoff for mobile nodes roaming in heterogenous wireless networks. The advantages of FSSH include: (1) Achieving the purposes of fast, secure, seamless handoff when they move between different sub-networks, (2) Reducing handoff delay and packet loss while roaming and recducing signaling overhead of integration of different mobility communication protocols, (3) Overcoming signaling control load caused by the NAT problem while mobile node uses SIP protocol for VoIP, and (4) Providing compatibility of the different ASP mobility network environments. Numerical results demonstrate that FSSH outperforms other approaches in handoff delay and signaling cost. Meanwhile, FSSH provides fast and seamless handoff or roaming in hetegeneous wireless networks that belong to different ASPs. Finally, FSSH effectively reduces packet delay and packet loss due to secure authentication.