This article is part of the series Multimedia Communications over Next Generation Wireless Networks.

Open Access Research Article

Cross-Layer Handover Scheme for Multimedia Communications in Next Generation Wireless Networks

Yuliang Tang1, Chun-Cheng Lin2, Guannan Kou1 and Der-Jiunn Deng3*

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Communication Engineering, Xiamen University, Fujian 361005, China

2 Department of Computer Science, Taipei Municipal University of Education, Taipei 10048, Taiwan

3 Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, National Changhua University of Education, Changhua, Taiwan

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EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2010, 2010:390706 doi:10.1155/2010/390706


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jwcn.eurasipjournals.com/content/2010/1/390706


Received:27 February 2010
Accepted:14 August 2010
Published:16 September 2010

© 2010 Yuliang Tang et al.

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

In order to achieve seamless handover for real-time applications in the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) of next generation network, a multiprotocol combined handover mechanism is proposed in this paper. We combine SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), FMIP (Fast Mobile IPv6 Protocol), and MIH (Media Independent Handover) protocols by cross-layer design and optimize those protocols' signaling flows to improve the performance of vertical handover. Theoretical analysis and simulation results illustrate that our proposed mechanism performs better than the original SIP and MIH combined handover mechanism in terms of service interruption time and packet loss.

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