Vertical handover between LTE and wireless LAN systems based on common resource management (CRRM) and generic link layer (GLL)

Abstract

It is expected that many heterogeneous wireless networking systems such as 3GPP Long-term Evolution (LTE) systems, WiMAX/WiBro systems and WLAN systems will be exist in next generation wireless communication environment. Under such environment, various communication services will be introduced by integrating heterogeneous wireless networking technologies, especially at the radio access networks. In order to provide such integrated communication services, integrated radio resource management and seamless vertical handover across such heterogeneous access networks should be supported. In this paper, to tackle these problems, we propose a Generic Link Layer (GLL) based common radio resource management (CRRM). In particular, we propose the network architecture and functions of each network element for integrated radio resource management among heterogeneous access networks. Then, we propose policybased and multi criteria decision making (MCDM) based seamless vertical handover schemes between LTE and next generation WLAN systems. Performance of the proposed vertical handover schemes are evaluated via extensive simulation studies. Simulation results show that the proposed VHO schemes outperform other VHO schemes such as received signal strength (RSS) based VHO scheme in terms of throughput, handover success rate and the service cost. Copyright © 2009 ACM.