A New Method to Support Umts/Wlan Vertical Handover Using Sctp Li Ma, Fei Yu, and Victor C
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MOBILITY AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT A NEW METHOD TO SUPPORT UMTS/WLAN VERTICAL HANDOVER USING SCTP LI MA, FEI YU, AND VICTOR C. M. LEUNG, THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA TEJINDER RANDHAWA, BRITISH COLUMBIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY ABSTRACT Many proposals to solve the mobility manage- Fixed serve ment problem in heterogeneous wireless networks 3.3.3.1 This article proposes a new method to facili- are found in the literature. Mobile IP (MIP) [3] tate seamless vertical handover between wide- from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) area cellular data networks such as UMTS and is a network layer solution. By inserting a level of WLANs using the Stream Control Transmission indirection into the routing architecture, MIP Router 3 3.3.3.0 Protocol (SCTP). The multihoming capability provides transparent support for host mobility, and dynamic address configuration extension of including the maintenance of active Transmission Internet SCTP are applied in an UMTS/WLAN overlay Control Protocol (TCP) connections and User architecture to decrease handover delay and Datagram Protocol (UDP) port bindings. In this improve throughput performance. Unlike tech- scheme, a home agent and a foreign agent are used niques based on Mobile IP or Session Initiation to bind the home address of a mobile host (MH) r 1 Ro Protocol, the SCTP-based vertical handover to the care-of address at the visited network and 22 0 scheme does not require the addition of compo- provide packet forwarding when the MH is mov- Unlike techniques based nents such as home/foreign agents or a SIP serv- ing between IP subnets. Triangular routing of all er to existing networks. Therefore, the proposed incoming packets to the mobile host via the home on MIP or SIP, the scheme provides a network-independent solution network can cause additional delays and waste of preferred by service providers. Performance bandwidth capacity. If the correspondent host has SCTP-based vertical evaluations are presented to demonstrate the knowledge of where the MH is located, it can effectiveness of the proposed scheme. send packets directly to the care-of address of the handover scheme does MH, thus enabling route optimization. The Ses- sion Initiation Protocol (SIP)-based approach [4] not require the addition INTRODUCTION aims to keep mobility support independent of the The complementary characteristics of third-gener- underlying wireless access technologies and net- of components such as ation cellular networks such as the Universal work layer elements. SIP is an application layer Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) and protocol. When an MH moves during an active home/foreign agents or 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs) session into a different network, it first receives a make integrating these two technologies attractive new network address, and then sends a new ses- SIP server to the [1, 2]. While UMTS networks provide always-on sion invitation to the correspondent host. Subse- wide-area connectivity with relatively low data quent data packets are forwarded to the MH existing networks. rates to users with high mobility, WLANs offer using this new address. much higher data rates to users with low mobility Although both MIP- and SIP-based approach- over smaller areas. Contemporary mobile devices es can provide some level of vertical handover are increasingly equipped with multiple (e.g., support between UMTS and WLANs, experi- UMTS/WLAN) network interfaces, which enable ments have shown that it is difficult to maintain This work is based in part the mobile user to access the Internet using the the continuity of ongoing data sessions during on a article presented at higher bandwidth offered by a WLAN whenever handover due to the long handover latency [5, IEEE VTCfall, Orlando, possible, and using UMTS service otherwise. 6]. Mobile users may experience quality of ser- FL, Oct. 2003. Since mobile users accessing the Internet via vice (QoS) degradation or session disruption/ter- UMTS/WLAN are free to move, an efficient mination during vertical handovers if these This work was supported mobility management scheme is crucial in this approaches are used. In this article we introduce by grants from Telus integration. Mobility management consists of sup- a novel transport-layer scheme to support Mobility and the port for roaming, which provides reachability of UMTS/WLAN vertical handovers. Unlike tech- Advanced Systems Insti- mobile users, and support for handover (also niques based on MIP or SIP, this approach fol- tute of BC, and by the referred to as handoff in the literature), which lows the end-to-end principle [7] in the Internet: Canadian Natural Sci- provides ongoing connection continuity in spite of anything that can be done in the end system ences and Engineering movements across and between UMTS and should be done there. Since the transport layer Research Council under WLANs. Handovers between UMTS and WLANs is the lowest end-to-end layer in the Internet grant CRD247855-01. are commonly referred to as vertical handovers. protocol stack, it is a natural candidate for verti- 44 1536-1284/04/$20.00 © 2004 IEEE IEEE Wireless Communications • August 2004 cal handover support. Moreover, in the transport layer approach, no third party other than the endpoints participates in vertical handover, and Internet no modification or addition of network compo- server nents is required, which makes this approach universally applicable to all present and future network architectures. In addition, user mobility Internet in wireless networks has a significant impact on transport layer performance. A transport layer GGSN approach to vertical handover enables the end nodes to adapt the flow and congestion control Tight Loose parameters quickly, thus offering the potential coupling coupling SGSN for significant performance enhancements. This approach is used in [8], which proposes a new set of migrate options for TCP to support mobil- ity. However, the approach in [8] requires glob- RNC WLAN gateway ally changing the widely deployed TCP, which is very difficult, if not impossible, in practice. A new transport layer protocol, Stream Con- trol Transmission Protocol (SCTP) [9], has recently been accepted by the IETF as a Request Node B Access point for Comments (RFC), joining TCP and UDP as a general-purpose end-to-end protocol above the IP layer. In this article we apply the multihoming feature and the latest dynamic address reconfig- WLAN coverage uration (DAR) extension [10] of SCTP, referred UMTS coverage to as the mobile extension of SCTP (mSCTP) [11], to support UMTS/WLAN vertical hand- over. SCTP was previously proposed to support Mobile client handover over homogeneous wireless networks [5]. However, experimental results in [5] show a GGSN:Gateway GPRS service node SGSN: Serving GPRS service node long interruption time during an SCTP han- RNC: Radio network controller dover. In this article we apply SCTP to support vertical handover between heterogeneous wire- I Figure 1. Integrated UMTS/WLAN systems. less networks. We consider UMTS/WLAN verti- cal handover support via two types of SCTP configurations, single-homing asymmetric config- interworking [1, 2, 14]. Figure 1 shows the archi- uration [12] and dual-homing symmetric configu- tecture for UMTS/WLAN integration. ration [11], and apply SCTP message bundling In a tight coupling interworking architecture, [13] to reduce handover latency. The perfor- a WLAN is connected to an UMTS core net- mance of these configurations is evaluated by work in the same manner as other UMTS radio computer simulations. Results show that the access networks. The WLAN gateway imple- proposed scheme can overcome the problem of ments all the UMTS protocols (authentication, long interruption time during handover, espe- mobility management, etc.) required in the cially in the dual-homing SCTP configuration. UMTS radio access network. In this approach, The rest of this article is organized as follows. UMTS and WLAN would use the same authen- The next section describes the UMTS/WLAN tication, mobility, and billing infrastructures. The vertical handover problem. We present an main advantage of this solution is that the mech- overview of mSCTP. We describe the protocol anisms for mobility, QoS, and security in the architecture and procedures to support UMTS core network can be reused directly over UMTS/WLAN vertical handover using mSCTP. the WLAN. However, tightly coupled solutions We then present the simulation results to evalu- will be highly specific to the UMTS technology ate the handover latency and throughput perfor- and require extensive access interface standard- mance. Finally, we conclude the article. ization of WLANs beyond the existing standards. Moreover, the configuration and design of UMTS/WLAN VERTICAL HANDOVER UMTS network elements, such as the serving General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) support Since UMTS and WLANs will coexist to offer node (SGSN) and gateway GPRS support node Internet access to end users, the integration of (GGSN), have to be modified to sustain the these networks to allow seamless switchover of increased traffic from WLANs. services would be desirable from both the opera- In the loose coupling approach, the WLAN tor and end user perspectives. In this section we gateway does not have any direct connection to describe integrated UMTS/WLAN systems and UMTS network elements. Instead, it connects to several challenges in this integration, particularly the Internet. WLAN traffic would not go the issue of seamless vertical handover. through