Abstract

In this era of emerging technologies, the main issue is to discover the appropriate neighbor access network during handoff mechanism for a mobile node. We require handover because in this heterogeneous environment, there can be several networks (Wi-Fi, WIMAX and UMTS) in a geographical area which are not so interoperable. For abiding the services we use Media Independent Information Service (MIIS) provided by IEEE 802.21 MIH standards (Buiati et al., 2010) to select the most suitable network. This study provides a brief overview of how the challenges associated with the handoff are solved by several proposed schemes. In the introduction, role of MIIS is comprehensively defined to represent its importance followed by issues associated with handoff. Then, it gives an overview of the latest research activities in this field, including all the problems faced during handoff process. The study concludes by giving a new hierarchical scheme presenting implementation of MIIS servers to significantly improve the mobility.

Keywords:

Handoff delay, IEEE 802.21 MIH, Inter-zone Handoff, neighbor discovery time, query response, twolevel hierarchy,

References

Competing interests

The authors have no competing interests.

Open Access Policy

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Copyright

The authors have no competing interests.