Design and Implementation of a WLAN/CDMA2000 Interworking Architecture

In this article, we discuss interworking architectures for providing integrated service capability across the widely deployed 3G CDMA2000-based and 802.11-based networks. Specifically, we present two design choices for integration, namely tightly-coupled and loosely-coupled, and recommend the latter as a preferred solution. We describe in detail the implementation of the loosely-coupled integrated network, which provides two kinds of roaming services, the Simple-IP service, and the Mobile-IP service. We present in detail two new components used to build these services: a network element called WLAN integration gateway deployed in WLAN networks and a client software on the mobile device. For a mobile device with interfaces to both technologies, our system supports seamless handoff in presence of overlapping radio coverage.