Introduction on Cellular/WLAN Interworking

Motivated by the ever-increasing demand for wireless communication services, the past decades have witnessed rapid evolution and successful deployment of wireless networks. It is widely accepted that next-generation wireless networks will be heterogeneous in nature with multiple wireless access technologies. While the heterogeneity poses new challenges to achieve inter-operability among different wireless networks, their complementary characteristics can be exploited with the interworking to enhance service provisioning. The popular cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) are two most promising radio access technologies. The cellular/WLAN interworking has attracted intensive research attention. In this chapter, we provide an overview of related work on cellular/WLAN interworking and an effective system model to capture the essential characteristics of cellular/WLAN integrated networks.