Flexible bound handover control algorithm for mobile IPTV services

Abstract

IPTV (Internet Protocol Television) is a promising technology for digital television service delivered using the Internet Protocol over a network infrastructure. As users, who demand mobile services, increasing recently, the mobile IPTV services that independent of user access technologies are required. In addition, mobile services need seamless handover mechanism for the satisfaction of both users and mobile service providers. One of the solutions to support seamless handover is multi-homing. However, multi-homing needs the resource allocation of users for the on-going connections. Since dropping an ongoing connection is generally more sensitive to a mobile user than blocking a new connection request, handover connections should have a higher priority over the new connections in order to minimize the handover blocking probability. In the WLAN and WiBro networks, high priority handover, which is between WLAN and WiBro, considers cost, user preferences, user mobility range, and so on. Moreover, the mobile users, who want to use two or more networks for the wide area mobility, pay more money than single network users. Therefore, this kind of handover should have higher priority to support QoS requirement of wide area network users. So we proposed a flexible bound handover control scheme for handover connection requests in heterogeneous wireless networks. By adopting this scheme, we expect the improvement of handover blocking probability. In performance evaluation, we compare proposed algorithm against traditional non-bounded and fixed bound schemes. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme improves handover blocking probability without degradation of new connection blocking probability.