Copyright © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Location assisted fast vertical handover for UMTS/WLAN overlay networks
Available online 10 March 2006.
Abstract
UMTS/WLAN integration offers considerable benefits for the mobile users as well as for the mobile network. As soon as coverage is available, a mobile user should switch seamlessly from the ubiquitous low bandwidth UMTS network to a high bandwidth WLAN. This will improve his quality of service, but also increases capacity in the cellular network. To be able to change between radio access technologies, an inter-RAT handover protocol is needed. If this handover protocol is not fast enough, the vehicular user will penetrate deep into the cell before packets get delivered to the right access point, underutilizing the available bandwidth with a lower overall performance as a result. In this paper, we introduce a new vertical handover protocol which uses location information from the vehicle to predict where and when the handover should occur, thus optimizing user throughput and network performance. We consider its deployment on three UMTS/WLAN integration scenarios.
Keywords: Handover; UMTS; WLAN
Article Outline
- 1. Introduction
- 2. UMTS/WLAN inter-RAT handover
- 2.1. Very tight coupling
- 2.2. Tight coupling
- 2.3. Loose coupling
- 3. Location assisted proactive vertical handover
- 3.1. Introduction
- 3.2. APACHE protocol
- 4. Implementation requirements
- 4.1. Very tight coupling
- 4.2. Tight coupling
- 4.3. Loose coupling
- 5. Results
- 6. Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- References
- Vitae






E-mail Article
Add to my Quick Links

Cited By in Scopus (1)







