Future Generation Computer Systems 26 (2010) 14031408

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Future Generation Computer Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/fgcs

Seamless handoff scheme in Wi-Fi and WiMAX heterogeneous networks

Fei Shi, Keqiu Li , Yanming Shen
School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, No.2, Linggong Road, Dalian 116023, China

article info abstract

Article history: With the development of wireless communication technology, various wireless networks have been
Received 28 December 2009 deployed. Heterogeneous networks will be dominant in the next generation wireless networks. In such
Received in revised form networks, providing a seamless handoff and quality of service (QoS) guarantees is one of the key issues
12 April 2010
for real-time services. In this paper, we propose a horizontal handoff scheme that reduces the horizontal
Accepted 16 April 2010
Available online 7 May 2010
handoff latency based on the location and movement pattern of a mobile node (MN). We also present a
vertical handoff scheme for providing seamless services between Wi-Fi and WiMAX networks. Finally, by
Keywords:
performance evaluation using computer simulations, we show that the proposed scheme can reduce the
Vertical handoff handoff latency significantly.
Horizontal handoff Published by Elsevier B.V.
Heterogeneous networks
Mobile IPv6

1. Introduction have quite different QoS mechanisms. WiMAX uses a mechanism

With the development of wireless communication technology,
wireless Internet access has become a trend. People want to have
multimedia services anytime, anywhere. However, these applica-
tions have higher QoS requirements. Due to the limited coverage
of a wireless network, a mobile node (MN) has to switch to other
Access Point (AP) when it moves out of the current AP. There are
handoff delay and packet loss during this process. This is particu-
larly important for VoIP and other real-time services. Seamless mo-
bile handoff requires uninterrupted communications while an MN
is moving in the wireless networks. Providing a seamless handoff
is one of the key issues in real-time services. There are two main
aspects to compare handoff schemes: switching delay and packet
loss rate. A lot of work has focused on reducing delay and packet
loss rate during handoff.
However, there is not only one standard protocol in wireless
networks, as next generation mobile networks consist of multi-
ple heterogeneous mobile networks with different coverage range,
quality and cost. There are often several different wireless net-
works in the same region, such as IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) and IEEE
802.16 (WiMax). WiMAX uses spectrum which needs to be au-
thorized to access to the Internet. Wi-Fi uses unlicensed spec-
trum to provide access to a network. A Wi-Fi enabled device
such as a PC or mobile phone can connect to the Internet free of
charge within the coverage. Therefore, Wi-Fi is more popular in
end user devices. A typical Wi-Fi router might have a range of
32 m indoors and 95 m outdoors. A commonly held conception is
that WiMAX will deliver 70 Mbit/s over 50 km. WiMAX and Wi-Fi
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: keqiu@dlut.edu.cn (K. Li).
0167-739X/$ see front matter. Published by Elsevier B.V.
doi:10.1016/j.future.2010.04.011
based on connections between the base station and the user de-
vice. Each connection is based on specific scheduling algorithms.
Wi-Fi cannot guarantee the QoS requirements. In the real scenario,
a mobile user is often at the overlap signal range of WiMAX and
Wi-Fi at the same time as shown in Fig. 1.
There are two kinds of handoffs, horizontal handoff and ver-
tical handoff. Horizontal handoff is the handoff between differ-
ent wireless access points that use the same technology. To over-
come handoff latency, two horizontal handoff schemes, hierarchi-
cal MIPv6 (HMIPv6) [1] and Fast Handoff for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) [2] are
proposed by IETF. Combination of HMIPv6 and FMIPv6 motivates
the design of Fast Handoff for HMIPv6 (F-HMIPv6) [3], which leads
to more efficient network bandwidth usage. However, simulation
experiments [4] show that the main latency occurs in Movement
Detection (MD). Those above proposed methods cannot reduce the
handoff latency significantly. Ref. [5] proposed a method based on
dynamic region to reduce the movement detection delay, which
dynamically adjusts the interval according to the bandwidth uti-
lization. However, the AR might send advertisements frequently
even though the MN does not need handoff, a large number of
advertisements are useless and wasted. NDPR [6] (No uniform
Detection and CoA Pre-register) introduces a nonuniform detec-
tion pattern. It can be inferred that the MN has moved into a new
AR once MN finds that the marked MAC is changed. The interval is
set according to the distance between the MN and the current AR.
But an MNs movement pattern is also very important to forecast
handoff and adjust the interval appropriately.
Vertical handoff refers to a mobile node changing the type of
connectivity it uses to access a supporting infrastructure, usually to
support node mobility. It is very important and more complicated
in the heterogeneous wireless communication. Paper [7] proposed
1404 F. Shi et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 26 (2010) 14031408

(2) Handoff Preparation Reply (HPRep) message: This message is

sent by the MAP to the MN and contains prefixes of subnet, the
list of candidate ARs and their capability.
(3) Handoff Preparation Notification (HPN) message: This mes-
sage is sent by the MN to the MAP to notify the possibility of
impending handoff. It contains the information about the se-
lected new AR that the MN will switch to. HPN includes the
request for verification of pre-configured new on-link care-of
address (NLCoA) and for establishment of bi-directional tun-
nel between the MAP and the NAR in order to prevent routing
failure during handoff.
(4) New Link Attachment (NLA) message: This message is sent by
the MN to the NAR to announce its presence on the new link
and to confirm the use of NLCoA.

2.1. Dynamic interval adjustment

When the MN knows that it moves into a NARs coverage, it

sends a message to the PAR and NAR, to let them know that the
MN is in the overlap coverage. This also means handoff may hap-
Fig. 1. Heterogeneous networks.
pen later. As the MN moves at the threshold switch decided by the
distance, it sends the handoff request to the NAR and PAR. Then
a method that used two independent handoff triggers. The Signal
the handoff process initiates. Therefore, if the MN wants to know
to Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) is used to trigger handoff
the exact time when the handoff happens, it must detect its po-
if communication is going to lose. And the throughput triggers
sition more frequently. But too many detections will cost a lot of
handoff when the quality of current network degraded. However,
overhead and aggravate the MNs burden. Furthermore, since each
a minimum time between two handoffs needs to be manually set
network has different situations (like bandwidth, the ARs cover-
and these two parameters are decisive metrics in vertical handoff.
age and other configurations of the network), we cannot set the
Another handoff procedures was proposed in paper [8]. But it did
not consider the handoff trigger, which is an important component detection interval to be static.
to reduce handoff latency. Paper [9] used the available bandwidth For the proposed scheme, we define x to be the distance be-
and received signal strength index to be the handoff metric. But tween the MN and the PAR, and y to be the MNs speed. Let T be the
it didnt provide simulation result to prove its efficiency. [10] maximum interval, be the compression radio. is a non-linear
presented a handoff method that used the IEEE 802.21 information function, which depends on x. is a variable determined by y.
elements and the GPS location information. However, only few and are compression parameters used to find the best and
mobile devices are equipped with GPS and the IEEE 802.21 protocol in different networks respectively. Let h(x) be the switch intensity,
is not fully defined and really commercialized yet. [11] introduced which can be obtained from Eq. (6). Then we have
a generic vertical handoff decision function for heterogeneous t = T . (1)
wireless networks. But it did not describe how to determine the
weight of each parameter. is defined by
In this paper, we presents a horizontal handoff method and ln[1 + (1 h(x))]
a vertical handoff method by taking the MNs location and its = g ( x) = , ( > 0, d > x > 0). (2)
ln(1 + )
movement pattern into account. The MN can detect its position
information by using devices such as GPS and save it in its buffer. Then we can calculate by
According to the location information, the movement pattern, the
ln(1 + y)

speed and the direction of movement can be figured out. When the
, 0 < y < 3,
ln(1 + y)

MAP receives the handoff preparation request (HPReq) sent from = (3)
the MN, it selects an appropriate NAR to handoff [12], and notifies ln(1 + y) ,

y 3.
the MN by handoff preparation reply (HPRep). The MAP gets the ln(1 + y)

ARs information within its domain by exchanging messages with
Let d be the maximum coverage of the AR. We have
them. The detection interval is adjusted by the speed.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we x/d
propose our low latency horizontal handoff method (LLHH). In l= , (d > x > 0). (4)
dx
Section 3, we fist introduce some previous vertical handoff pro-
tocols, and present our vertical handoff scheme in heterogeneous Supposes L follows the negative exponential distribution with
networks. We evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme parameter l. We can get Ls distribution function as follows:
via simulations in Section 4. Section 5 concludes this paper.
FL (l) = 1 el , (l > 0). (5)
2. Horizontal handoff Let the distribution function be the switch intensity, so we have
FL (l) = h(x). (6)
In this section, we first introduce four main ICMPv6-type [13]
messages for handoff management: Then we can get t from (1), (2), (8), (4) and (5), that
(1) Handoff Preparation Request (HPReq) message: This message d(dxx)
ln[1 + e ]
is sent from an MN to the MAP for handoff request preparation. t = T. (7)
It contains information about user preferences/profile, appli- ln(1 + )
cations required QoS capabilities, L2 information of ARs, IP ad- As shown in Eq. (7), the detection interval is adjusted dynam-
dress of the MN, signal strength of the MN and the ARs ID for ically. When the MN is far from the PAR, the interval will be set
MN location tracking. small. On the contrary, the MN will have a long interval if the MN
 F. Shi et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 26 (2010) 14031408
is close to the PAR. At the same distance, the intervals are also dif-
ferent with different speeds. By taking the speed into account, we
can avoid the situation that the MN moves a long distance between
two detections when the speed is high, since the intervals will be
small at high speed.
2.2. Handoff process
Unlike FHMIPv6 [3] and NDPR [6], the MN can initiate the
handoff when it moves at the threshold for our scheme. The whole
handoff process is shown in Fig. 3.
(1) When an MN detects that it is moving at the edge of the
current AR range, it sends HPReq to MAP for handoff request
preparation. The MN attaches its location information to
HPReq.
(2) The MAP obtains the MNs trace and the latest location. Then
it selects the most appropriate NAR for the MN switch, accord-
ing to the distance between the MN and the NAR and the MNs
moving direction. The MAP gets the ARs routing table informa-
tion and maintains them by router information eXchange (RIX
request/Reply) message [5].
(3) The MAP sends a HPRep message to the MN, containing an ad-
vertisement of the NAR. This message also contains informa-
tion about the Next Link Care-of-Address (NLCoA) for the MN
to use in the NAR region (i.e., NARs network prefix for stateless
auto-configuration or NLCoA for state configuration). It notifies
the best candidate ARs prefix of subnet to the MN.
(4) After the MN obtains the candidate AR, it sends HPN to the
MAP with the request for verification of pre-configured NLCoA.
When the MAP receives HPN, it forwards this message to the
NAR. The NAR sends an NLAck message to the MAP, including
whether the NLCoA can be used or not. If the request NLCoA is
collided, NAR will attach a valid NLCoA. This message will be
forwarded to the MN by the MAP.
(5) Once L2 handoff occurs, the packets are forwarded to the NAR
and the PAR. And these packets are saved in the NARs buffer.
When the MN receives the message from the NAR, it sends a
NLA message to notify the NAR to send those saved packets.
(6) The MN makes a Local Binding Update (LBU) and Local Bind-
ing ACK (LBACK) exchange with the MAP to inform its arrival
at NAR.
3. Vertical handoff
In vertical handoff, the situation is more complicated. The hand-
off metrics in this situation should include RSSI, user preference,
network conditions, application types, cost etc. Based on the hand-
off metrics mentioned above, the decision about how and when
to switch the interface to which network will be made. In this
paper, we mainly study the vertical handoff between Wi-Fi and
WiMAX. Vertical handoff includes two kinds of handoffs: from
Wi-Fi to WiMAX and from WiMAX to Wi-Fi. For users, cost is the
most attractive reason to use Wi-Fi. Furthermore, there are small
users in each access point (AP), so the actual translation rate will
not be smaller than WiMAX. Therefore, user should access to Wi-Fi
as much as possible. We have proposed a new approach to achieve
the low latency vertical handoff. According to the state of the net-
work environment, as well as the different MN, respectively con-
figure the handoff in order to achieve the fastest handoff. In the
wireless network, MNs most important characteristic is mobility,
therefore we have introduced the velocity of the MN as an impor-
tant parameter to trigger the vertical handoff.
(1) Handoff from Wi-Fi to WiMAX. When the connection is going
down, if there is other Wi-Fi AP meet access request, the
preferred choice is to handoff to the NAP. If there is no NAP
around can be accessed, MN must handoff to WiMAX once
reaching the trigger.
1405
(2) Handoff from WiMAX to Wi-Fi. Usually, a WiMAX network may
cover one or more Wi-Fi networks. Because of small range of
Wi-Fi, MN will quickly move out of a base stations coverage
when at high speed, so handoff should not be triggered. These
communications will not last long, but lead to unnecessary
handoffs. While MN doesnt move fast, handoff will happen
when reaching the trigger.
3.1. Dynamic trigger setting
One method to improve seamless handoff is the ability to
correctly decide when to carry out vertical handoff. The key of
vertical handoff performance is to make handoff decision appropri-
ately. Signal strength, which is the main metric in traditional hori-
zontal handoff, cannot be used to vertical handoff decisions due to
the overlap of heterogeneous networks and the different physical
techniques used by each network. The velocity has a larger effect in
vertical handoff. Because the user would pass the original network
in a short time when he travels at high speed. Therefore, we must
take the velocity into account. We set the handoff trigger dynami-
cally with the speed. based on the moving direction, we can make
correct decision of handoff or not.
Let RSSIstand be the stand RSSI of Wi-Fi. If the MN receives signal
strength bigger than RSSIstand , MN can receive packets from this
network with high quality service. Let RSSItrigger be the handoff
trigger in Wi-Fi, and let RSSIav erage be the average RSSI that the MN
received from Wi-Fi (RSSIreceiv ed ). If RSSIav erage > RSSItrigger , then MN
could handoff to this network. Let be the parameter determined
by velocity, be a weigh parameter. We have
ln(1 + y)
, when leave Wi-Fi,
ln(1 + y)
= (8)
ln(1 + y)
, when enter Wi-Fi.
ln(1 + y)
Then we can get
RSSItrigger = RSSIstand (9)
RSSIav erage = RSSIreceiv ed (1 )RSSIav erage1 . (10)
1. Handoff from WiMAX into Wi-Fi. The handoff will carry out
once RSSIav erage > RSSItrigger .
2. Handoff from Wi-Fi into WiMAX. RSSIstand < RSSIav erage <
RSSItrigger means that the link of Wi-Fi is going down, and MN
should prepare the handoff in advance. This predicable handoff can
finish before leaving original network, which reduces latency of
passive handoff. And RSSIav erage < RSSIstand means the link of Wi-Fi
is down, handoff must be carried out immediately.
3.2. Vertical handoff process
When the MN enters a Wi-Fi network, it detects that the new
network signal. The MN sends handoff request message to AP, and
the information of MN is sent to the AP. Then the AP configures
the required information according to MNs information to register
the MN in this network. The AP responds the configuration to the
MN. Once the new network reaches handoff trigger, handoff can be
carried out using the configuration information.
When the MN leaves a Wi-Fi network and enters a WiMAX
network, it finds the signal of Wi-Fi is going down, and it detects
a new WiMAX network using 802.16 interface. Before the link
is down, MN communicates with the BS to configure register
information. After that, vertical handoff will be carried out. Fig. 4
shows the vertical handoff process.
We save the commonly used APs subnet prefix in the cache of a
MN. When the MN detects a new Wi-Fi network, it should compare
the subnet prefix with those saved in the cache. Because of cached
1406 F. Shi et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 26 (2010) 14031408

Table 1
System parameters configuration in horizontal handoff.
Parameters Values

Wired link bandwidth 10 Mbps

802.11 Wireless link bandwidth 1 Mbps
802.16 Wireless link bandwidth 15 Mbps
Data package size 512 bytes
Advertisement package size 48 bytes
802.11 AR cover range 40 m
802.11 AR overlap range 10 m
802.16 BS cover range 1000 m
Maximum interval 5 ms
Data rate 4 Mbps

Fig. 3. Horizontal handoff process.

Normal operate

Yes

Detect new Wi-Fi Original Wi-Fi

network network going down

No

No

Search in the Detect a new

blacklist Wi-Fi
Fig. 2. Horizontal handoff scenario.
No
No
information are small and the local computing speed is fast, the
Search in the
time of comparison can be neglected. The cache information will white list
be classified as the blacklist and whitelist. For example, we save the Yes Detect WiMAX

APs which we often pass by but not stay in it in the blacklist, and No

save the APs which set in the office or home in the whitelist. When Yes
Reach the
the MN detects a new Wi-Fi network, it first searches the blacklist, trigger
and maintain the current connection if a match is found. Otherwise,
Reach the
it searches the whitelist. If the match is successful, handoff should Yes trigger
Yes
be carried out immediately. If the network detected is not in the
whitelist or the blacklist, then the handoff process is carried out as
described above. Handoff

4. Performance evaluation
Fig. 4. Vertical handoff process.
The proposed low-latency handoff scheme has been imple-
1.4
mented using the ns2. The standard ns distribution version ns-
allinone2.29 is patched with the freely ns wireless extension
1.2
module, and the Mobile IPv6 is available.
In horizontal handoff evaluation, parameters and default values 1
Handoff latency (s)

used in performance evaluation are listed in Table 1, and the

network topology considered for our analysis is illustrated in Fig. 2. 0.8
In the network, there are two MAPs and three ARs. AR1 and AR2
are in the MAP1 and AR3 is in the MAP2. At the beginning of the 0.6
simulation, the MN is close to the AR1. The MN moves towards
the AR2. The handoff happens as the MN moves at the threshold 0.4
switch. The handoff delay is defined as the interval between the
last packet from PAR and the first packet from NAR that the MN 0.2
receives. Fig. 5 shows the handoff latency at different speeds.
In the low speed pattern, all the switches happen in the overlap 0
1 3 5 10 15 20 25 30 40
of the two ARs coverage. For LLHH, according to forecast handoff MN move speed (m/s)
with the distance and the speed, the handoff happens much closer
to the middle of the PAR and the NAR. And the MN rarely leaves the Fig. 5. Comparison of horizontal handoff latency.
PARs coverage, but just moves in the overlap, such as people walk
around. When the MN moves slowly, there is enough time to judge switches. It is more efficient in reality. While the speed is high, the
whether the MN will leave and complete handoff before the MN latency increases apparently for FHMIPv6 and NDPR. Although the
leaves the PARs domain. So LLHH can reduce many unnecessary latency is high for LLHH, it is also nearly half of the other two. And
 F. Shi et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 26 (2010) 14031408 1407

0.65 The Latency of Handoff from WiMAX to Wi-Fi

0.112
0.6
0.55 0.11

0.5
0.108
Packet loss rate

Handoff Latency
0.45
0.106
0.4
0.35 0.104

0.3
0.102
0.25
0.1
0.2
0.15 0.098
1 3 5 10 15 20 25 30 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
MN move speed (m/s) Velocity

Fig. 8. Handoff latency from WiMAX to Wi-Fi.

Fig. 6. Comparison of horizontal handoff packet loss.

The Packets Loss Rate

The Latency of Handoff from Wi-Fi to WiMAX
0.007 0.028
0.026
0.006 0.024

The Packets Loss Rate

0.022
0.005
Handoff Latency

0.02
0.004 0.018
0.016
0.003
0.014
0.002 0.012
0.01
0.001 0.008
0.006
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Velocity
Velocity

Fig. 9. Packets loss rate in whole handoff process.

Fig. 7. Handoff latency from Wi-Fi to WiMAX.

as possible. As the bandwidth of Wi-Fi is lower than WiMAX and

when the speed is under 10 m/s, the latency does not increase with
the speed for LLHH.
Fig. 6 shows the packet loss during handoff process. We observe
that package loss is much less for LLHH than for FHMIPv6 and NDPR
while speed is under 10 m/s, especially at the average walking
speed (about 1.5 m/s). In high speed pattern, more messages will
be sent by the MN. So when the network bandwidth is low, there
may be congestions. For LLHH, packet loss increases, but still less
than FHMIPv6 and NDPR.
In vertical handoff evaluation, we change the 802.11 Wireless
link bandwidth to 11 Mbps, 802.11 AP cover range to 20 m and data
packet size to 4960 bytes. The network configuration is shown in
Fig. 1.
Fig. 7 shows the handoff latency from Wi-Fi to WiMAX. While
the MN moves from WiMAX into Wi-Fi, our scheme can reduce
the handoff latency, especially at high speed. When MN moves
fast, the handoff latency of our scheme is nearly half of the MIH.
And Fig. 8 shows the handoff latency from WiMAX to Wi-Fi. As
the MN leaves Wi-Fi and enters into WiMAX, it will take more
time to finish handoff. Because the BS is usually far from the MN.
The situation may be worse if the MN leaves Wi-Fi before the
handoff is complete. Therefore, as we make sure that the handoff
can be complete as the MN moves out of Wi-Fi, the vertical handoff
latency can be reduced.
As a whole handoff process, the MN passes a Wi-Fi network
from WiMAX. Fig. 9 shows the packets loss rate in the whole
handoff process. In our scheme, the MN should stay in Wi-Fi as long
lack of QoS, most packets losses are caused in Wi-Fi. So packets loss
rate of our scheme is a little bit higher than the MIH at low speed.
However, the handoff happens earlier in our scheme at high speed.
This will reduce packet loss rate as the MN moves fast.
5. Conclusions
In the next generation wireless networks, providing a seamless
handoff and quality of service (QoS) guarantees is one of the key
issues in real-time services. Several handoff schemes have been
proposed in the literature. However, these schemes cannot handle
all scenarios. This paper provides a low latency handoff scheme,
including horizontal handoff and vertical handoff. In homogeneous
networks, an MN can detect its movement and forecast the
handoff, which alleviates the communication cost between the MN
and its Access Point (AP). Furthermore, by setting the dynamic
interval in an appropriate range, the MNs burden can also be
alleviated. In heterogeneous networks, the vertical handoff scheme
uses the velocity to be an important metric to trigger handoff.
Our scheme classifies the 802.11 APs into blacklist and whitelist.
The scheme can avoid unnecessary vertical handoff. Finally, by
performance evaluation using computer simulations, we show that
the proposed scheme can reduce the handoff latency significantly.
Acknowledgements
This work is supported in part by Program for New Century
Excellent Talents in University (NCET) of Ministry of Education of
1408 F. Shi et al. / Future Generation Computer Systems 26 (2010) 14031408
China, and also in part by NSFC under Grant Nos. 60903154 and
60973117.
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Fei Shi is a master student at the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technol-
ogy, China. He received his bachelor degree from the De-
partment of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong
University of Technology in 2006. His research interests in-
cludes QoS control, and handoffs in wireless networks.
Keqiu Li is a Professor at the Department of Computer
Science and Engineering, Dalian University of Technology,
China. He received his bachelor and master degrees both
at the Department of Applied Mathematics, Dalian Uni-
veristy of Technology in 1994 and 1997, respectively. He
obtained his Ph.D. degree at the graduate school of Infor-
mation Science, Japan Advanced Insititue of Science and
Technology in 2005. He also has two years post-doctoral
experience in Univeristy of Tokyo, Japan from 2005 to
2007. His general research interests include computer
networks and security, web technology, and distributed
computing.
Yanming Shen is an Associate Professor in the Computer
Science and Engineering Department at Dalian University
of Technology, China. He received the Ph.D. degree from
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at
the Polytechnic University (now Polytechnic Institute of
NYU) and his B.S degree in Automation from Tsinghua
University, Beijing, PR China in 2000. He was a summer
intern with Avaya Labs in 2006, conducting research
on IP telephony. His general research interests include
packet switch design, peer-to-peer video streaming, and
algorithm design, analysis and optimization.