A flexible handover mechanism for seamless service continuity in heterogeneous environments

The success of wireless access technologies, such as wireless LANs, has forced mobile operators and manufacturers to consider their integration into 3G infrastructures. Nowadays, several research groups and standardization bodies are working to provide such integrated architectures. One of the main aims of these architectures is to provide seamless service continuity to users that move from one access system to another. Towards this end, new mobility management mechanisms are required to minimize transition time between systems and efficiently handle the scarce radio resources to guarantee specific Quality of Service (QoS). This paper specifies such an architecture, which will enable continuous QoS support in an integrated system of multiple access technologies. More specifically, the paper focuses on the network context information that has to be considered during a transition between these systems and the required handover mechanism for the support of seamless service continuity. This architecture requires slight modifications of existing protocols and supports differentiated treatment for each active service.