Policy-based flow control for multi-homed mobile terminals with IEEE 802.11u standard

The latest IEEE 802.11u extends the highly popular IEEE 802.11-2007 standard towards supporting interworking with external networks. It however relies on a single 802.11 network interface card only, which fails to support simultaneous access of 802.11 and non-802.11 services. As such, multiple heterogenous wireless network services have yet to be effectively utilized. In this paper, we suggest to extend the original 802.11u STA (STAtion) address allocation and management, which enables multi-homing for 802.11u single interface STA by deploying the MCOA-MIP6 protocol in the network layer (layer 3). We further develop policy flow control for both up-link and down-link packets toward better QoS for mobile users and better resource utilization for carriers.We have implemented our proposal in a Linux-based testbed. The experimental results have proven that our policy-based flow control mechanism provides better user experience. It also effectively achieves load balancing and enhances fault tolerance.