Seamless session mobility scheme in heterogeneous wireless networks

The next generation wireless communication system will likely be heterogeneous networks, as various technologies can be integrated on heterogeneous networks. A mobile multiple-mode device can easily access the Internet through different wireless interfaces. The mobile multiple-mode device thus could switch to different access points to maintain the robustness of the connection when it can acquire more resources from other heterogeneous wireless networks. The mobile multiple-mode device therefore needs to face the handover problem in such environment. This work introduces Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based cross-layer scheme to support seamless handover scheme over heterogeneous networks. The proposed scheme consists of a battery lifetime-based handover policy and cross-layer fast handover scheme, called the SIP-based mobile stream control transmission protocol (SmSCTP). This work describes the major idea of the proposed scheme and infrastructure. The proposed scheme has been implemented in Linux system. The simulation and numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SmSCTP scheme yields better signaling cost, hand-off delay time, packet loss and delay jitter than SIP and mSCTP protocols. Copyright (C) 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.