Mobility management for the support of handover within a heterogeneous mobile environment

Intra-technology handover algorithms already exist for each cellular wireless technology. Although these algorithms will continue to evolve with their respective technologies no revolutionary change is justified. No handover algorithm yet exists for the support inter-network handovers. In this paper, a mobility manager function is defined and its support of a hierarchy of handover algorithms is proposed. The mobility manager makes use of existing intra-technology handover algorithms where these are sufficient and a new, higher order, inter-network, inter-technology, handover algorithm is introduced.