Current mobility management systems are operator centralized, and focused on single link technologies. In heterogeneous wireless mesh networks, vertical handovers could be a lengthy procedure. In order to support contextaware handovers between heterogeneous wireless cells, the mobile user needs to access information managed by administratively separate domains. Handover does not occur based on blind discovery mechanisms on the link layer but based on a pre-discovery of the wireless mesh topology using a context-aware search process. The mobile user has access to an overlay which forms a middleware that connects separate management domains, while allowing the user to retrieve uniform descriptions of underlying access technologies. Based on the topology information and access capabilities of the user, a context-aware handover is carried out. The overlay queries are sent to edge management servers to retrieve the cells' status as near to real-time as possible. The query system uses t...
Amine M. Houyou, Alexander Stenzer, Hermann de Mee