A vertical handover based on software communications architectures

We suggest a new software component, DomainBroker, on the software communication architecture (SCA) of the Software Defined Radio (SDR) Forum for supporting a vertical (intersystem or interdomain) handover between different systems. The recent software components in the SCA core framework (CF) are incongruent for supporting vertical handover because there is the DomainManager software component in the highest component concept. Thus, a supervisor component is needed to manage a number of DomainManager components for vertical handover. It is possible to maintain interoperability and independence between different domains by means of our DomainBroker component. We also designed extensible markup language (XML) document type definition (DTD) relationships of domain profile with DomainBroker, and the CF interface definition language (IDL) relationships between DomainBroker and other software components, such as DomainManager, DeviceManager, FileManager, etc.