Vertical Handover Control Considering End-to-End Communication Quality in IP Mobility

In this paper, we propose a vertical handover decision system for IP mobility communication and describe its implementation with existing IP mobility architecture. Our proposed handover decision tries to reflect that a specified communication quality such as VoIP takes a priority. In other words, the purpose of our proposal is to prefer the specified communication quality in handover across heterogeneous networks. To realize this, the proposed decision method decides handover by a given user policy that a specified communication has priority and by end-to-end network performance. These handover criteria are measured between a mobile node and its correspondent node in IP mobility communication. In evaluations by experiments with the prototype system, we show that the proposal improves end-to-end communication quality in the viewpoint of QoS class classified by ITU-T Y.1541 compared the existing decision methods. Also, we mention the difficulty of deployment of this system.