Performance evaluation of a handover model for integrating mobile broadcast technologies within heterogeneous networks

The move towards an increasingly heterogeneous infrastructure has been one of the directions followed by most mobile operators in recent years. Here, one of the problems still waiting for a solution is how to enable multi-mode mobile terminals to freely roam between the different wireless systems used by the network operator for providing access to its users. The IEEE 802.21 is just one of the standardization groups trying to address this problem by developing a framework to facilitate the inter-system handovers taking place between communication systems like WLAN, WiMAX and the ones developed by the 3GPP and 3GPP2 groups. In recent months, the IEEE 802.21 group has also stated its intentions to expand its solution for supporting also mobile multimedia broadcast technologies. In this paper we describe such a handover model, based on the IEEE 802.21 specification that enables the optimal integration of mobile broadcast technologies, like DVB-H into existing heterogeneous network.