Multi-Access Mobility in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks Today and Tomorrow

The wireless network landscape is changing gradually from homogeneous to heterogeneous and future generation networks are envisioned to be a combination of diverse but complimentary access technologies, like GPRS, WCDMA/HSPA, LTE, WiMAX, and WLAN. One issue which has become apparent recently with the proliferation of different link layer technologies is how service providers can offer a consistent service across heterogeneous networks and also across access networks that they don't own themselves. The paper presents the current inter-working technologies and preferred ones, and schemes that provide QoS. This paper highlights some open issues that need to be addressed in order to enable multi-access mobility. The paper shows that inter-working between access technologies should be limited to only those where there exists a strong business case or operator interest.