Interoperability procedures between access technologies using IEEE 802.21

Next generation wireless communication will integrate the heterogeneous wireless technologies in order to provide better services, with improved quality, higher coverage, and seamless access to the system resources. Providing support for the connection transfer between different access technologies — vertical handover — together with radio resources management for the integrated networks are the major integration challenges. IEEE has introduced the 802.21 standard which provides a technology-independent abstraction layer. It provides a framework to be used as a starting point for the integrated wireless networks development. In this paper, a solution, built on the IEEE 802.21 — Media Independent Handover — framework is presented, along with some aspects related to the implementation of the system modules in QualNet simulator. The proposed system tries to offer a solution for both the vertical handover process and radio resource managemnet. The paper focuses on system functionalities evaluation for the vertical handover process implemented on a heterogeneous wireless network, implemented with WiMAX and WiFi technologies. The experiments were performed on a simulated platform implemented in QualNet.