Prototyping and optimization of IEEE 802.21-based reconfigurable mobile terminal

Abstract

This paper presents a prototyping and optimization approach for reconfigurable mobile multi-interface terminal. The mechanism that controls the operation of the available miniport drivers on the mobile device utilizes IEEE 802.21-defined entities in combination with Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) application programming interface (API). The created terminal prototype is able to perform seamless vertical handovers among three different networks: Ethernet, WLAN and UMTS. The testing of the developed prototype with different traffic generators resulted in optimization of its transmission parameters. Furthermore, the paper proposes an optimization of the handover procedure from a local to global wireless network by implementing intelligent prediction of imminent handovers. The results show that this optimization reduces the handover latency and the average inter-packet delay.