New efficient cross‐layer and multihoming mechanisms at layer 2 for inter‐radio access technology handover between UMTS and WiMAX

Abstract

Next generation mobile networks will provide seamless mobility between existing cellular systems and other wireless access technologies. To realize a seamless vertical handover (inter‐radio access technology handover) among these different access technologies, a multi‐interfaced mobile station (i.e., multihomed) is a good approach to provide better handover performance in terms of packet loss rate and handover latency. In this article, we propose a novel layer 2 multihoming approach for inter‐radio access technology handover between Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) in both integrated and tight coupling architectures. This layer 2 multihoming approach has the ability of enabling either soft handover or make‐before‐break handover to adapt to mobility scenarios for the sake of a lossless and short latency handover procedure. Our simulation results show that, in case of handover from UMTS to WiMAX for transmission control protocol (TCP) traffics, the layer 2 multihoming approach can achieve a lossless and zero latency handover procedure by enabling soft handover. In case of handover from WiMAX to UMTS, because of the fact that the performance gain of soft handover is more affected by the differences of bandwidth and transmission delay between these wireless links, the make‐before‐break handover is preferred to achieve lossless and short latency handover procedure. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Towards the performance evaluation of 4thgeneration wireless communication standards: LTE versus Mobile WiMAX

“…Beside several publication in which the authors discuss different characteristics and properties of the Mobile WiMAX standard, such as Quality of Service (QoS), scheduling, and security, some of the papers for Mobile WiMAX provide a brief discussion about its performance, such as and . Moreover, the majority of publications that evaluate the PHY layer performance of Mobile WiMAX have the same issues that we mentioned for LTE publications.…”