Method and apparatus for handover from wireless local area network to wireless wide area network

A handover apparatus, the apparatus comprising:

• a wireless communication unit for communicating with a wireless local area network and a wireless wide area network;
• a storage unit for storing an integrity failure count and a retransmission count for data received from the wireless local area network;
• and
• a control unit for controlling the wireless communication unit for handover from the wireless local area network to the wireless wide area network,
• wherein the control unit controls a process of checking integrity of received data, determining, if the received data lacks integrity, whether the received data was received within a preset threshold time from a preset reference time, retrieving, if the data was received within the threshold time, the integrity failure count and the retransmission count for the received data from the storage unit, and performing, if the integrity failure count exceeds a preset maximum allowed number of failures and the retransmission count exceeds a preset maximum allowed number of retransmissions, handover from the wireless local area network to the wireless wide area network.

A handover method, the method comprising:

• receiving data from a wireless local area network;
• determining whether the received data lacks integrity based on a comparison of at least two fields of the received data;
• determining whether the received data was received within a preset threshold time from a preset reference time;
• retrieving, if the received data lacks integrity and if the received data was received within the preset threshold time, an integrity failure count and a retransmission count for the received data from a storage unit;
• and
• performing, if the integrity failure count exceeds a preset maximum allowed number of failures and if the transmission count exceeds a preset maximum allowed number of retransmissions, a handover from the wireless local area network to a wireless wide area network.