Policy-enabled handoffs across heterogeneous wireless networks

Access is the kilter app [3] is the vision of the Daedalus project at U.C. Berkeley. Being able to be connected seamlessly anytime anywhere to the best network still remains an unfulfilled goal. Often, even determining the "best" network is a challenging task because of the widespread deployment of overlapping wireless networks. In this paper, we describe a policy-enabled handoff system that allows users to express policies on what is the "best" wireless system at any moment, and make tradeoffs among network characteristics and dynamics such as cost, performance and pou er consumption. We designed a performance reporting scheme estimating current network conditions, which serves as input to the policy specification. A primary goal of this work is to make it possible to balance the bandwidth load across networks with comparable performance. To avoid the problem of handoff instability, i.e., many mobile hosts making the same handoff decision at essentially the same time, we designed randomization into our mechanism. Given the current "best" network, our system determines whether the handoff is worthwhile based on the handoff overhead and potential network usage duration.