Patent ID: 8175066

Claim:
An apparatus for providing a service to a terminal through a plurality of heterogeneous wireless networks, the apparatus comprising: a controller, comprising hardware, the controller configured to allocate a representative Internet Protocol (IP) address to the terminal and bind a different sub-IP address, allocated to the terminal by the plurality of heterogeneous wireless networks, to the representative IP address for each heterogeneous wireless network which the terminal is currently connected, wherein the terminal is located in a service overlap area of the plurality of heterogeneous wireless networks; a copy unit configured to copy first IP packets with the representative IP address received from an IP network according to a number of heterogeneous wireless networks to which the terminal is currently connected; a converter configured to convert the copied first IP packets with the representative IP address into second IP packets with the corresponding sub-IP addresses and transmit the converted second IP packets to the plurality of heterogeneous wireless networks; a decapsulator configured to decapsulate IP packets received from the plurality of heterogeneous wireless networks; and a selector configured to sort the IP packets provided from the decapsulator according to sequence numbers, select one IP packet for each sequence number, and transmit the selected IP packets to the IP network.