IEEE 802.21: Media independence beyond handover

The IEEE 802.21 standard facilitates media independent handovers by providing higher layer mobility management functions with common service primitives for all technologies, thus hiding the technology specifics of the lower layers. Right after the base specification was published, several voices rose up in the working group advocating to broaden the scope of IEEE 802.21 beyond handovers. In this way, the Media Independence concept incepted within this working group would form the basis of a new generic Media Independence Service Layer, which can be used in other scenarios. Although this discussion continues, recently several steps have been taken in this direction. This paper aims at updating the reader with the main challenges and functionalities required to create this Media Independence Service Layer, through the analysis of scenarios which are being discussed within the working group: 1) Wireless Coexistence, and 2) Heterogeneous Wireless Multihop Backhaul Networks.