Group Handover among Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

In the past few years, significant work has been done towards inter-operation of heterogeneous networks such as WLAN, UMTS and DVB. Most work so far has aimed to provide an integration of these networks rather than their co-operation. In the mobile VCE III program, heterogeneous networks remain autonomous, independently-managed entities. In other words, networks are inter-worked and cooperate with each other to provide enriched services to users. The networks are owned by and under the control of their respective operators. The access cores of these networks are inter-connected via a logical interface enabling inter-working at the network and service layers. As part of the mobile VCE Core III program, we focus on mobility management, which is the key issue to support seamless roaming of the mobile users among these heterogeneous networks in an efficient way. In this paper, we consider a group handover scenario from a WLAN to DVB/UMTS network within the network mobility (NEMO) framework