A Handover Scheme Based on HMIPv6 for B3G Networks

By complementary integration of UMTS and WLAN, a beyond third generation (B3G) mobile network has been proposed to establish better global roaming environments. The integrations of UMTS and WLAN are classified into two groups: loosely-coupled and tightly-coupled. A tightly-coupled network demands lots of investment and considerable amount of time to construct. On the other hand, a loosely-coupled network is more scalable and easier to implement than a tightly-coupled one while it has critical drawbacks of packet loss and blocking of services due to handover delay. To alleviate these drawbacks, this paper proposes a handover scheme between UMTS and WLAN, which is based on HMIPv6. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated adding the handover time of each step, and the blocking probability is computed in each scheme. The proposed internetworking scheme’s performance based on HMIPv6 is two times more likely than that based on MIP.