Fast Handover in Multi-hop Systems Beyond 3

Seamless mobility management across all radio bearers and service continuity is a key functional feature in next generation mobile networks. There are different kinds of mobility types that occur within the same radio technology or between different ones. However, one basic mechanisms of mobility management is handover. In multi-hop scenarios the most challenging task is enabling and supporting of efficient handover. Different to the common beacon transmission of access points respectively base stations and multi-hop nodes a new approach is proposed in this contribution that inverts the traditional mechanism of information provisioning for handover and gets rid of the frequent transmission of beacons. The mobile terminal broadcasts a handover request message to the neighbouring network entities (base stations, access points and/or multi-hop nodes). Upon reception of this request the link conditions will be determined and the best point of attachment will be selected. Utilizing this fast transparent handover mechanisms will result in reduced signalling overhead and low handover latency.