A new solution for micro-mobility management in next generation networks

One main feature of next generation networks should be its heterogeneous communication environment, where different systems coexist and various wireless access networks and corresponding services are used. Despite the large number of current protocols, we believe that no efficient solution is available for automatic handoff between different wireless technologies. In order to develop an efficient technology agnostic solution, we propose to manage the problem just above the link layer. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for the vertical handoff problem that operate at the layer 2.5. Our proposal is mainly based on an MPLS switching process and a Virtual Network Interface (VI) concept.