Optimized Handover Scheme Using IEEE 802.21 MIH Service in Multi-Service Environment

The scenario that different RATs are used to satisfy mobile user's two or more application requirements simultaneously in heterogeneous network is called multi-service environment. Recently, powerful multi-mode wireless terminal, which is suitable for multi-service situation, has become the test product. The mobility management (MM) issues, especially handover, of different interfaces in the test product are resolved independently with a network layer solution FMIPv6. The packet loss of FMIPv6 could become an MM bottleneck. A potential approach of improving packet loss performance jointly between interfaces in multi-service scenario exists in our research. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel scheme using IEEE 802.21 MIH services to improve packet loss performance by utilizing the active links to maintain the data flow. The MIH services, Link_Action and MIH_Link_Action, are extended and an MIH event named Link_PDU_Receive_Status is added. A complete message exchange in handover procedure is provided. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed scheme performs better in terms of packet loss comparing with the traditional independent FMIPv6 scheme.