Vertical Handover Management for VoIP Session over Broadband Wireless Networks

Today, wireless LAN (IEEE802.11g/n) has been the dominant wireless network that can provide high data rates in a limited coverage area. While emerging mobile WiMAX (IEEE802.16e) can provide a wireless broadband access to mobile users in a wide coverage area. These two different technolgies will co-exist while complementing each other in some regions, hence, a mobile node (MN) with dual interfaces traverses and executes many handovers (HOs) between 802.11g and 802.16e. Meanwhile, there is a huge demand for Voice over IP (VoIP) service over wireless networks. However, VoIP is a delay and loss sensitive application, hence, VoIP session is more likely to be deteriorated during HO between 802.11g and 802.16e. In order to maintain quality of VoIP session during HO, we proposed Vertical Handover Management (VHM) for VoIP session that focuses on HO initiation and decision strategy according to the wireless link condition and congestion state of wireless networks. The VHM exploits request to send (RTS) retries and round trip time (RTT) between an MN and an access point in an 802.11g interface as well as a carrier to interference noise ration (CINR) level and MN’s queue length of an 802.16e interface as HO triggers. We then conducted simulation experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed VHM using QualNet 4.5. Our simulation results show that our proposed VHM can preserve the quality of VoIP session during such HOs.