Multi-RAT mobile node architecture for efficient handover using software defined network

Owing to an increase in mobile devices and the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), mobile traffic has increased exponentially. Consequently, a wide range of research on handover has been conducted to provide mobile device users with stable network quality. Most research on handover uses a network-dependent method that establishes a new protocol or a method that can refine handover time; however, these methods are difficult to apply because they necessitate network-level changes or they are unable to reduce the fundamental delay that occurs in handover, respectively. This paper suggests a simple and powerful handover scheme based on Multi-Radio Access Technology (Multi-RAT) as well as a method to efficiently use Multi-RAT when handover is not required. This method uses a Multi-RAT terminal equipped with a motion sensor. If a terminal motion exists, the active link and standby link of the mobile node enhance handover performance through data transfer and sensing, respectively. If the node is stationary, its transfer throughput is increased through Carrier Aggregation (CA). In this study, we build a testbed to enable handover based on the aforementioned mechanism and assess the performance of the proposed method through an experiment.