Dual home agent (DHA)-based location management scheme in integrated cellular–WLAN networks

For seamless integration of cellular and wireless local area network (WLAN) systems, we introduce a dual home agent (DHA)-based location management. The DHA maintains the location information both in the cellular and WLAN systems, and therefore unnecessary registration cost can be significantly reduced. In addition, a heuristic, which first looks for the called mobile node (MN) in the cellular system, is proposed to reduce the session setup latency. We analyze the registration cost, session setup delay, and registration delay. Numerical results demonstrate that Mobile IP with the DHA can reduce the registration cost significantly and allows a session setup delay that is comparable to that of the basic Mobile IP.