Software assisted handover of mobile clients in heterogeneous wireless computing environments

Nowadays, application roaming in heterogeneous mobile networks is difficult to support at a sufficient level of service. The networks are independent and noncooperative. Together with different network characteristics, such as bandwidth, latency and error rate, they pose significant impediments to application roaming. Besides, there is no existing hardware and software for such kind of application roaming as the existing hardware or software can only be used to perform the handover in a homogeneous network. However, the problem could be solved by embedding the necessary functionality at a software level. A software-assisted handover between wireless LAN and WAN is suggested in this paper for application roaming in heterogeneous networks.