Soft Handover scheme for WSN nodes using media independent handover functions

Abstract

The present wireless networks are equipped with multiple radio links and operate in a collaborative way to enable continuous data transfer even when any link goes down. The IEEE 802.21 is a standard to provide continuous wireless connectivity between heterogeneous link technologies using media independent handover functions as MIHF. The standard supports handover between IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.16, 3GPP cellular networks. The wireless sensor networks (WSN) based on IEEE 802.15.4 consists of sensors to monitor various physical or physiological activities and to transfer the collected data to the remote controlling station using a short range radio. But in this case if the wireless node moves out of each other's communication range data transfer is not possible. So in this paper, the WSN communication protocol is made as a part of the IEEE 802.21 stack to explore the handover feature offered by the standard. The proposed stack has an internal partition to make WSN protocol to operate independently with other similar modules as long as they are in range, and the MIH function gets triggered by the application when the home networks are not available thus to provide handover from other link interfaces.

The proposed hardware has IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.16, and 3GPP links which are operated by the MIH functions along with the IEEE 802.15.4 interface. So the WSN modules are provisioned to have connectivity from multiple radio interfaces even if they move out of the coverage range from the current point of access. The proposed primitives for handover between WSN and other links are efficient in providing reliable handoff.

Keywords: IEEE 802.21, Media independent handover, IEEE 802.15.4, Wireless sensor network.