SINR based Media Independent Handover in WiMAX and WLAN networks

Subscribers are becoming more demanding regarding roaming capabilities across different networking technologies such as WLAN, WiMAX, and CDMA as they claim service continuity with QoS requirement and good security features. To achieve seamless handover between different access technologies is a great challenge as it needs to obey different performance of QoS and security constraints. Heterogeneous handover requires collecting network information from different entities that are not necessarily interoperable and then applying optimized policies to execute the appropriate handover decision and processing them. In this paper, a QoS based vertical handover mechanism between WiMAX and WLAN networks is proposed by applying the Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR). The Media Independent Handover (MIH) (IEEE 802.21) protocol is adopted to assist in the handover decisions by providing a suitable platform for vertical handovers.