Seamless handover in integrated WDM/TDM PON and WiMAX architecture

For advanced IP-based cellular network, seamless handover is a fundamental issue in mobility management, and it faces many challenges, include in-order packet delivery, no packet replication, no packet loss, low signaling overhead and minimum handover latency. To address these challenges, Optical Wireless Integration (OWI) appears as a promising technology because optical access technologies provide high bandwidth, low transmission delay and reliability. In this paper, we propose a new mobility management protocol for OWI which takes advantage of several mobility management protocols specified by IETF and services defined by IEEE. The performance analysis and numerical results show that our mobility management protocol can effectively solve all the challenges related to seamless handover and can efficiently improve handover performance in terms of handover latency, signaling overhead, packet loss and packet reordering.