Research on the Implementation of the Virtual Interface on Multi-mode Mobile Nodes

In this paper, we propose the virtual interface management scheme on the multi-mode mobile node for supporting multiple connections to various access networks in fixed mobile convergence (FMC) networks. The proposed scheme supports the virtualization of multiple physical network interfaces by presenting only the virtual interface to beyond IP layers and hiding physical network interfaces from them. In the proposed scheme, only one IP address is allocated to virtual interface without any IP allocations to physical network interfaces. Therefore, the proposed scheme does not change its IP address and keep it during the vertical handover, so that it can support the seamless handover of real-time multimedia services among heterogeneous access networks. The proposed scheme is implemented on the multi-mode mobile node with multiple network interfaces by using NDIS (Network Driver Interface Specifications) libraries. Through the mobility test-bed and the test application of virtual interface, we evaluate and analyze the performance of the proposed scheme.