Seamless handover across heterogeneous wireless networks: A programmable metric approach

For a mobile user equipped with multiple wireless interfaces, tic selection of the "best" base station to access the wired network at any moment is not simply related to the goodness of the Physical channel quality. but also implies a technology choice as a trade-off between performance, cost, power consumption, etc. In order to provide transparent roaming,cross different systems. two fundamental problems have to be solved: the authentication/addressing mechanism (mobility management) and the comparison between heterogeneous performance parameters (handover detection criterion). In this work, we deal with the design. implementation and evaluation of a reconfigurable architecture for profiling, composing and deploying handoff services across heterogeneous networks. These operations are based oil a software module named RAMON. that is placed in mobile stations and optionally in base stations. RAMON module operates on abstract models of the main communication functions of a wireless system and allows the development of platform-in dependent handover control logic.