An effective vertical handoff scheme based on service management for ubiquitous computing

When a ubiquitous computing environment is based on seamless connectivity, intelligent network management among heterogeneous network interfaces, called vertical handoff (VHO), is required. However, conventional VHO schemes are based only on network information, and do not address service management for seamless service execution. This paper thus proposes a middleware architecture supporting efficient seamless connectivity with service management. In this architecture, we define core modules to perform VHOs in accordance with the context of services and user intention, in addition to network information. We also define profiles that express the contexts associated with the VHO process and service management. With the proposed scheme, we show that the number of unnecessary VHOs and application failures is significantly reduced, leading to an enhancement of around 34% in data throughput. The approach also reduces application failures by 50% and the number of VHOs by 32%. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.