An enhanced media independent handover framework for heterogeneous wireless networks

IEEE has introduced a standard on vertical handover known as Media Independent Handover (IEEE 802.21 MIH) which aims to achieve end user mobility by assisting the vertical handover across heterogeneous wireless technologies thus improving end user experience. However, the current MIH standard lacks context-aware architecture which is needed to adapt to the changing network dynamics and mechanisms to distribute load uniformly in the network. In this paper, we propose an enhanced architecture to IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) framework in heterogeneous wireless networks. In the enhanced MIH framework, we add in a new network element known as Handover Agent(HA) for simplifying handover overhead at mobile nodes and offering more seamless vertical handover to mobile nodes. The proposed architecture addresses several challenges involved in unified heterogeneous network system such as context-aware handover, load balancing and signaling overhead. We also present comparative mathematical analysis of our proposed architecture with respect to the current MIH standard.