Enabling Intelligent Handovers in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

In the future Wireless Internet, mobile nodes will be able to choose between providers offering competing services at a much finer granularity than we find today. Rather than months, service contracts may span hours or minutes. Connectivity, however, is just one of many possible services. Providers will begin to offer network and application-level services targeted at improving the overall wireless experience of the user. Determining the best path through the various networks will require accurate information describing which services are being offered by each provider. In this paper, we model the process of propagating this information as an instance of a distributed, hierarchical cache. Access routers actively discover and collect information about the immediate network neighborhood on behalf of mobile nodes. Mobiles fill their own caches through queries to their local access routers, and then employ the cached information to make informed, intelligent handover decisions. Through sim...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: MONET
• Authors: Robert C. Chalmers, Govind Krishnamurthi, Kevin C. Almeroth
• Keywords: Access Router, Future Wireless Internet, Mobile Node, MONET 2006