Location Information Look-Up for Intelligent Handover Decision

IEEE 802.21 standard is developing media independent handover service which is consist of three services, media independent command service, media independent event service and media independent information service. Media independent information service provides a framework by which a media independent handover function both in a mobile node and in a network can discover and obtain homogeneous and heterogeneous network information within a geographical area to facilitate handovers. Also, media independent information service includes support for various information elements providing information that is essential for a handover module in the mobile node to make intelligent handover decision stored in information server. To do so, the mobile node has to discover at least one available information server in networks. This paper proposes a new mechanism in conjunction with DHCP to discover various network information stored somewhere in Internet. Also, implementation has shown that the proposed mechanism can be a convenient and valuable IS location information discovery mechanism in some cases.