Mobility with QoS in Broadcast Unidirectional Technologies: Experimental Validation

Although mass entertainment markets, such as entertainment TV, were previously on the control of broadcast operators, the increased interest in supporting these multimedia services "anywhere and anyhow" is driving the interest of wireless operators. Therefore, the integration of broadcast technologies in the next generation networks is now a reality. However, since broadcast technologies are unidirectional, their use in mobile interactive communications requires the support of other technologies to enable the upstream communication through a return channel. This paper presents an experimental setup of the architecture developed in the framework of the IST-Daidalos project that is able to provide multimedia and interactive services through a heterogeneous network integrating DVB technology, and enabling seamless and media independent handovers with QoS support. The experimental testbed contains DVB, UMTS, Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi with WiMAX as backhaul technology, and supports seamless handovers with QoS between these technologies, integrating also handover of different return channels. The results show that the handover impact is more noticeable in handovers to DVB and UMTS technologies, when compared to Wi-Fi and WiMAX ones. Nevertheless, when the network is not overloaded, the handover timings do not exceed 200 msec.