| The ever increasing demand for network capacities has resulted in the industry looking into complex capacity enhancement techniques. Some of such capacity enhancement techniques are through the deployment of Micro and Femto cellular base stations, which serve a very small radio footprint compared to the regular base stations.;The addition of Micro & Femto cells can raise network capacities by localizing traffic, but at the cost of throughput and ambient noise. Although smaller, they are assigned radio channels from an operator's channel pool, which introduces co-channel interference and hence ambient noise levels. Secondly, miniature cells are assigned a couple radio channels at best, which results in reduced throughput levels, in technologies capable of using more than one radio channel.;This thesis details a type of handover technique that allows mobile terminals to handover to small-footprint radio networks like Wi-Fi, ZigBee, Bluetooth networks and use existing network infrastructure. In addition, since the non-cellular networks under consideration operate in spectrum other than the ones used by cellular networks, handing over to these cells, reduces the issue of ambient noise that results in the case of conventional Micro and Femto cells.;Further, the technique attempts to be network independent, as a result of which it would allow being deployed over any device equipped with the network interfaces under consideration.;This is achieved by setting up additional infrastructure (hardware/software) on a service provider's end and on the mobile terminal, which would allow the network to request a mobile terminal to perform certain network functions like establishing tunnels, and performing handovers.;The technique also attempts to be transparent to services running on the mobile terminal and to the end user, thereby allowing the network to provide more or less all the services it could have delivered over cellular networks, over non cellular access technologies. |
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