Performance Evaluation by Handoff Analysis in Wireless Local Area and Wide Area Networks

Next Generation Wireless networks consist of multiple heterogeneous access technologies such as UMTS, WLAN, Wi-Max etc.The main challenge in these networks is to provide users with a wide range of services across different radio access technologies through a single mobile terminal. Thecurrent trend in wireless data networks is to offer multimedia access to mobile usersby employing the wireless local area network (WLAN) standard IEEE802.11 whilethe user is located indoors, on the other hand, 3rd generation wireless networks(WAN) are being deployed to provide coverage while the user is located outdoors. As a result, the mobile node will require a handoff mechanism to allow the user to roam between WLAN and WAN environments, up to this date several strategies have been proposed (Robert hsieh [34]et al., 2004 and HyoJinet al., [51] 2007) in the literature, however, noneof these have been standardized to date. To support this interoperability, the mobilenode must be equipped with configurable wireless interfaces to support the handoffbetween the WLAN and the WAN networks. In the last work on the subject an algorithm had been proposed to allow a mobile node to roam between a wireless local area network (IEEE802.11) and a WAN base station (UMTS), while employing IP mobility support. The algorithm was implemented in simulation, with the help of Network Simulator 2 using TDD model. [7]. This paper presents the Handoff Analysis based on TDD Model using Network Simulator 2.