A Soft Handover Scheme Between UMTS and WLAN

With the advances in wireless communication technologies, mobile users require to get seamless services anywhere and anytime. To relize these demands, network interworking and vertical handover are necessary between heterogeneous wireless access technologies with multi-interface mobile station. A lot of organizations are doing research on the network integration schemes based on loosely and tightly integrated architectures, and research on vertical handover schemes mainly based on Mobile IP in loosely integrated environments. But actually, the tightly integrated scheme can support more faster vertical handover because heterogeneous access networks are combined tightly. However, vertical handover schemes in tightly integrated environments are conceptually proposed without any detail signaling procedures. Therefore, this paper defines a tightly integrated architecture between UMTS and WLAN, and proposes a soft vertical handover signaling procedure. The proposed soft vertical handover scheme is evaluated by the OPNET simulator, and we confirm the proposed scheme can support seamless services.