NeTS-WN: Collaborative Research: Supporting Multi-mode Terminals in Integrated Heterogeneous Wireless Netowrks

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Rapid advances in portable computing and wireless technologies are creating deployments of many different types of radio access networks such as WWANs, WLANs, and WPANs with different transmission rates, coverage ranges, power-levels, mobility-levels, services and price-levels. In such a heterogeneous architecture, devices equipped with multi-network interfaces (i.e., multi-mode terminals) should be capable of performing network selection, location update, paging, and horizontal and vertical handoff. The objective of this proposal is to provide an integrated heterogeneous wireless network to support multi-mode terminals in the multi-network environment, where the terminals take advantage of multiple interfaces to satisfy the QoS requirements. This proposal introduces new horizontal and vertical cross-layer features that allow multi-mode terminals to opportunistically exploit the available multi-networks. These new features include network availability detection and link quality estimation, and use information from different layers across multiple interfaces, in order to decide which connectivity-alternative best matches the requirements of an application. The multi-mode protocol stack will be defined such that it does not require any modifications to existing protocols so that different wireless technologies can also support multi-connection handoff and multi-network interfaces. From the system's perspective, proposed solution can help improve the overall system performance by redirecting the traffic to appropriate networks. Such an effective solution for connection and handoff management can lead to drastic performance enhancements.