Design, implementation and experimental evaluation of an end-to-end vertical handover scheme on NCTUns simulator Riaz Hussain ⇑ , Shahzad A. Malik, Shahid A. Khan, Shafayat Abrar Dept of EE, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Islamabad 44000, Pakistan article info Article history: Received 9 June 2011 Received in revised form 23 January 2012 Accepted 8 April 2012 Available online 1 June 2012 Keywords: Heterogeneous wireless networks Vertical handover Mobility Performance evaluation Simulation study Address translation End-to-end approach abstract This paper presents the simulation study of ‘‘Host based autonomous Mobile Address Translation’’ using NCTUns simulator. It is a network layer, end-to-end vertical handover solution, based upon modification of ‘‘Mobile IP with address Translation’’. Vertical hand- over approaches generally require new network elements, a new layer in TCP/IP stack, or fixing a protocol at a particular layer. To enhance handover experience, recent approaches focus on reducing signalling, localizing the registration, creating hierarchies, using proxy, preparing handover in advance, predicting target network, or exploiting multicasting and path extension techniques. These approaches, however, demand change in the network infrastructure to support mobility and limit the scope of mobility. Despite end-to-end sig- nalling, the Host based autonomous Mobile Address Translation scheme ensures minimum service disruption and distinctly allows global mobility of the mobile node without requir- ing any modification in the network. We have simulated the mobility of a multi-interface mobile node in a heterogeneous network environment composed of WiFi (IEEE802.11a, IEEE802.11b) and WiMAX (IEEE802.16e) access networks. Performance of the scheme is evaluated taking into account wide range of end-to-end delays between mobile node and the correspondent node, various speeds of the mobile node and different packet loss rates of the network. Based on our detailed simulation study, it has been observed that this scheme offers reduced service disruption time, packet loss and packet latency. The service disruption time is found to be significantly low (typically in the range of 10 ms) compared to that of Mobile IP (which is in the order of 100 ms); this makes this new scheme perfectly suitable for real time applications. Low service disruption time consequently reduces the packet loss by manyfold and the packet latency remains unaffected during and after hand- over due to translation of address at the source. The results suggest that this protocol is a viable vertical handover solution due to its simplicity, scalability, low overhead and ready deployability. Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In order to fully exploit the tremendous advantage of availability of diverse interfaces in today’s Mobile Nodes (MNs), the vertical handover offers the facility of carrying-over of a live session among diverse layer-2 access technologies. High speed wireless communication is currently available through diverse access technologies, such as WiFi, WiMAX and CDMA2000. 1569-190X/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.simpat.2012.04.004 ⇑ Corresponding author. Tel.: +92 333 5638665. E-mail addresses: rhussain@comsats.edu.pk (R. Hussain), smalik@comsats.edu.pk (S.A. Malik), shahidk@comsats.edu.pk (S.A. Khan), sabrar@comsats. edu.pk (S. Abrar). URL: http://ciit.edu.pk (R. Hussain). Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory 26 (2012) 151–167 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Simulation Modelling Practice and Theory journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/simpat