A Multi-Interface Proposal for IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover

In next-generation (NG) wireless networks, hybrid handover techniques are expected to enable the integration of heterogeneous networks, e.g. 3G cellular networks and 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN). Media independent handover (MIH) has begun to be discussed in the latest IEEE 802.21 to accommodate multiple disparate interfaces in mobile handset. Multiple interfaces can come in a variety of ways to facilitate hybrid handover, and may result in different requirements on protocols and performance. In this paper, we classify multi-interface schemes for handover in heterogeneous wireless networks. We propose a multi-interface scheme for IEEE 802.21 MIH. The scheme is proposed to be able to work with standard TCP and Mobile IPv4 agent routers without particular configuration. Based on this scheme, we implemented a dual-interface Mobile Host (MH) model in Network Simulation 2 (ns2) to evaluate how it performs in comparison with single-interface MH.