(A) study on the vertical handoff using SCTP multihoming feature

Abstract

Nowadays, the current Internet is being constructed from various kinds of network as we call it the heterogeneous network, and the mobile nodes can connect to the Internet at any time and any where. In such an environment, mobile nodes need new technology which can help it to keep the continuous connection and also its transmission quality during roaming through these different networks. There are many solutions at link layer, network layer and also application layer to support the mobility management. Among all of them, many researchers have already chosen Mobile IP as a recommendation using for the seamless handoff. When applied for the vertical handoff, it means the handoff between different networks in the heterogeneous systems; this solution has resulted in a very complex architecture and extremely heavy protocol. Especially, route optimization procedure suffers from a large overhead and the registering procedure may take a long time, many packets will be lost. Streaming Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) is a new proposed standard protocol for the transport layer. And its multi-homing feature enables SCTP to support mobility. Mobile node called multihoming can have more than one IP address, and the Dynamic Address Reconfiguration (DAR) extension with its enable to dynamically add or delete IP address of endpoints will combine with SCTP multi homing to support the mobility. Our approach is to study using this mobile SCTP solution for the vertical handoff in heterogeneous network and propose a decision time algorithm for this mobile SCTP vertical handoff from the UMTS network to WLAN and vice visa Unlike techniques based on Mobile IP (MIP) or Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), the SCTP-based vertical handover scheme does not require the addition of components such as home/foreign agents or SIP server to the existing networks. Therefore, it provides a network-independent solution that is preferred by service providers. Simulation experiments are presented ...