An Intelligent Seamless Handover Mechanism Based on IEEE 802.21

Integration of heterogeneous networks is one of the important characters of next-generation networks. As different access technologies may offer different attributes, it becomes a very important and challenging issue to ensure users access the most suitable network at any time, and make seamless handover while moving between different heterogeneous networks. In this paper propose an intelligent seamless handover mechanism based on MIHF (Media Independent Handover) which make full use of the information from different TCP/IP layers. MIHF only takes into consideration the link-layer information which is not sufficient to implement efficient handover. To solve this issue, we present an improved network architecture based on hierarchical mobile IP, with a new network entity NISE added to improve the MIH protocol. As an efficient handover solution should apply to different scenarios, we synthesize motion velocity, motion direction and relative location in the network of MN to identify different handover scenarios, and select different handover strategy to deal with each scenario.