Design,Implementation and Evaluation of Programmable Handoff in Mobile Networks

We describe the design, implementation and evaluation of a programmable architecture for profiling, composing and deploying handoff services. We argue that future wireless access networks should be built on a foundation of open programmable networking allowing for the dynamic deployment of new mobile and wireless services. Customizing handoff control and mobility management in this manner calls for advances in software and networking technologies in order to respond to specific radio, mobility and service quality requirements of future wireless Internet service providers. Two new handoff services are deployed using programmable mobile networking techniques. First, we describe a multi-handoff access network service, which is capable of simultaneously supporting multiple styles of handoff control over the same physical wireless infrastructure. Second, we discuss a reflective handoff service, which allows programmable mobile devices to freely roam between heterogeneous wireless access networks that support different signaling systems. Evaluation results indicate that programmable handoff architectures are capable of scaling to support a large number of mobile devices while achieving similar performance to that of native signaling systems.