Deploying the media independent information service at the edge of next-generation network

Roaming of cellphones between heterogeneous networks in the Next-Generation Network (NGN) causes the Vertical Handover (VHO) issue. The IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover (MIH) is one of important solutions for improving VHO efficiency. The MIH mainly provides the Media Independent Information Service (MIIS) by a centralized server. Yet, it requires a long time to exchange messages between a mobile node (MN) and the MIIS server. Therefore, we propose an alternative approach to provide the MIIS by deploying regional MIIS servers at the edge of NGN, called Edge-based MIIS, abbreviated as E-MIIS. We also design the aggregating function for availability information in the E-MIIS server. The design successfully reduces the number of MIH message exchanges, and shorten the message exchanging time during the VHO preparation phase. We analyze and compare the performance of the E-MIIS with the standard MIIS, decentralized MIIS, and context-aware MIIS in terms of the transmission delay, the queueing delay, and scan time. The results show that the proposed approach could make UE acquire handover information more quickly.