A study on IEEE 802.21 MIH frameworks in heterogeneous wireless networks

In recent years, various wireless access technologies have continuously grown as well as user demands have. However, such user demands have not been satisfied by each wireless access technology alone. Therefore, the Future Generation Networks (FGNs) are proposed to integrate various heterogeneous access technologies in order to support both vertical and seamless handovers. Especially, the IEEE 802.21 specifies Media Independent Handover (MIH) services to enhance the mobile user experience by optimizing handovers between heterogeneous access networks. In this paper, we focus on the handover framework using MIH messages, and adjust the framework to the integrated heterogeneous networks by employing novel messages. We additionally evaluate the performance of the proposed MIH framework in terms of handover latency by using numerical analysis.