Context gathering and management for centralized context-aware handover in heterogeneous mobile networks

Context-aware handover decision has recently been considered as a candidate for next-generation heterogeneous wireless networks. The context-aware handover methods proposed in the literature differ in some aspects, including the location of the handover decision (distributed or centralized). Depending on the location of the decision point, the appropriate part of the context knowledge should be transferred in those methods. This paper proposes a context gathering mechanism for a policy-based context-aware handover method, which implements mobile-initiated and network-assisted handover. The proposed network context gathering mechanism is based on a media-independent handover (MIH) framework and the paper justifies the usability of the extension using some analysis on signaling overhead and latency. Another part of the context is the preferences of the users, applications, and network operators, where this paper has proposed an automatic policy construction procedure to gather and employ them in generating policies. This procedure eliminates the complexity of making policies in previous policy-based context-aware methods and allows employing up-to-date network context information to dynamically modify the policies. Simulation results show better performance in terms of perceived quality for sensitive traffic.