RSVP Extensions for Seamless Handoff in Heterogeneous WLAN/WiMAX Networks

Providing a seamless handoff for QoS connections in heterogeneous wireless local networks (WLANs) and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) networks is crucial. The handoff delay is one of the troublesome issues that users are facing in the heterogeneous WLAN/WiMAX networks. Many mobile users still cannot obtain the network resources they need when employing real-time services such as voices, video conferences, video IP phones, and so forth while a handoff occurs, which usually causes a serious delay or even a break of the link. Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP) can provide the necessary QoS because of its bandwidth guaranteed capacity. In this paper, an RSVP extension scheme is proposed for seamless handoffs in the heterogeneous WLAN/WiMAX networks. The proposed scheme is based on QoS aware mobility architecture to guarantee a certain degree of QoS. The network selection is initiated by the mobility of the mobile station (MS) and a pre-handoff is performed based on received signal strength (RSS). Simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms the other two schemes.