Exploiting mobility patterns for inter-technology handover in mobile environments

Mobile terminals with multi-radio devices have become increasingly prevalent. This makes it possible for Internet applications to be supported by heterogeneous wireless networks while the terminal is on the move. As the user is constantly moving, it is highly desirable that the terminal connects to the best network and retains high performance of network connections. Handovers can be made within the same type of network (horizontal handover) or different types of networks (vertical handover). This paper focuses on link-layer inter-technology vertical handovers. Vertical handovers present several great challenges, such as user mobility randomness, high handover overhead and optimality requirement. Existing work often focuses only on the current network condition when making handover decisions, ignoring future performance of the terminal. As a result, a handover decision good for the current moment may soon become poor when the user moves to another place. This paper is motivated by the observation that users in a given mobile environment, such as university or enterprise campus, exhibit clear mobility patterns. We propose an approach for making handover decisions, which explicitly exploits user mobility patterns. This approach can produce high-performance handover decisions in the long run. Employing a comprehensive framework for preference customization, the approach supports user customization caring for different user preferences. Extensive real trace driven simulations and comparative study show our algorithm is better than the conventional vertical handover algorithms. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved