Information for handover management in heterogeneous networks: data representation,languages and integrated platforms

Due to the convergence of radio, television, telephony and Internet areas, the mobility of users, the ubiquity of services, and the development of new technologies to unify access provision, the interaction between providers and users will be required for access on demand in heterogeneous environments. This interaction should allow, in addition to seamless handovers, the negotiation based on technical requirements and user's desires during handover decision processes. The central part of the information being exchanged between the access provider's attachment points and user's devices should be a uniform and common structure that models the handover management information, in terms of what the information represents their semantic meanings and relationships. This work presents a set of ontologies, for this purpose, employed during handover decision processes, in integrated networking platforms for access on demand. A case study is presented, which demonstrates how a service could be integrated in two different platforms for such environment

Exploring multi-homing issues in heterogeneous networks

Mobile devices with two network interfaces (WiFi and 3G) are already commercially available. Pointto- point communications such as Infrared and Bluetooth are also readily used. In the near future, mobile phones will have several interfaces including satellite and new technologies such as Ultrawideband. Hence we must assume that such devices will be multi-homed by default. For various reasons, including network congestion, network resilience and increased endpoint bandwidth, there have been several attempts to address multi-homing. Heterogeneous environments with the need to support vertical handover introduce another set of issues which make the need to solve multi-homing problems more urgent. This paper outlines the issues, looks at past efforts and proposes a solution based on the Location Id/Node Id concept but also argues that additional support is needed to make such an approach efficient for heterogeneous environments

Enhancing naming and location services to support multi-homed devices in heterogeneous environments

The growth of the Mobile Internet is being fuelled by the development of heterogeneous devices which have several wireless interfaces. This brings new challenges which require a critical examination of current Internet Infrastructure with a view to providing better support for mobility, multi-homing and virtual networking. This paper considers a recently published solution to the multi-homing issue, and based on that proposes enhancements to support the core location and naming servers with the introduction of the Master Locator and the Enhanced DNS