Seamless Roaming

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Seamless Roaming

The ability to move between different wireless access environments is an essential but challenging problem for mobile users and one that few vendors have fully resolved. However, the Brand solution provides seamless roaming across all bearers or aggregates them, as required, too achieve a high-speed service, while ensuring continuity of connection without any user intervention.

How Seamless Roaming Works

A mobile user who is on a Wireless LAN and walks out of coverage, can automatically have their session re-directed over a 3G connection while maintaining the integrity of the session. A Wireless LAN user on a corporate LAN may roam out of his or her coverage footprint and drop onto a public WLAN connection; the system manages the changing subnets and continues the session over the changed infrastructure and routing, so long as the session management server is visible through the new bearer.

Crucial to seamless roaming is the ability to support the myriad wireless and WAN media that now exists – 2G, 3G, WLAN, WiMax, DSL, Satellite, Cable, DAB, DVB and others are all in popular use today with more to come. The Brand Apollo solution provides mobile data users with the ability to roam across all these network boundaries while ensuring that data is fully protected at all times via secure VPN connections. The system also includes many bearer authentication mechanisms including PPPoE. As the Apollo solution sits at the MAC layer it is an ideal mobility platform for many bearers and protocols.

A key strength of the Apollo Platform is the “Make-Before-Break” seamless transition. Apollo considers a handoff as “Make-Before-Break” when a viable path is established across a secondary network (or multiple secondary networks) before a primary network is dropped. Establishing viability for roaming requires that a network’s available bandwidth, packet loss, latency and jitter are taken into consideration prior to the handoff. Without establishing such metrics, handoff between networks will be best-efforts rather than best-quality leading to unexpected and unwanted outcomes.

“Make-before-break” Seamless Handoff is required to fully leverage key applications that support critical business situational awareness, and affects both intra-system roaming and inter-system roaming.

Brand’s Apollo is a highly secure, AES encrypted multi-bearer, roaming network solution, providing technology-agnostic, transparent, single-login access for the user. In so doing, it overcomes many of the shortcomings of Mobile IP, reducing network traffic and management traffic while providing the bi-directional (client-server and server-client) fast switching capability that is essential for supporting real-time applications such as VoIP.

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