Handoff management for mobile devices in hybrid wireless data networks

Today's wireless access networks consist of several tiers that overlap each other. Provisioning of real time undisrupted communication to mobile users, anywhere and anytime through these heterogeneous overlay networks, is a challenging task. We extend the end-to-end approach for the handoff management in hybrid wireless data network by designing a fully mobile-controlled handoff for mobile devices equipped with dual mode interfaces. By handoff, we mean switching the communication between interfaces connected to different subnets. This mobile-controlled hand-off scheme reduces the service disruption time during both horizontal and vertical handoffs and does not require any modification in the access networks. We exploit the IP diversity created by the dual interfaces in the overlapping area by simultaneously connecting to different subnets and networks. Power saving is achieved by activating both interfaces only during the handoff period. The performance evaluation of the handoff is carried out by a simple mathematical analysis. The analysis shows that with proper network engineering, exploiting the speed of mobile node and overlapping area between subnets can reduce service disruption and power consumption during handoff significantly. We believe that with more powerful network interfaces our proposal of dual interfaces can be realized.