QoS-aware handover control in current and future wireless/mobile networksUn mécanisme de gestion des transferts intercellulaires basé sur des contraintes de qualité de service dans les réseaux sans fil et mobiles

In this article we propose to enhance a handover management in a QoS and 4G based environments by providing a handover decision mechanism that considers QoS and other policies constraints. We introduce a policy based handover by combining the mobility management with the policy based architecture in order to achieve handovers that are triggered not only on the signal strength basis, but also on policy constraints such as cost, resource availability or load balancing. The policy based architecture will provide the handover triggering mechanism and the decision support related to the best next cell where the mobile node will move to. We also introduce mobility parameters in the Service Level Specification (sls) that specifies the handover type, the accepted handover packet loss, and the accepted handover delay. Based on thesesls mobility parameters, the QoS service classes can be mapped to the smooth handover (minimum packet loss), the fast handover (minimum delay), or the seamless handover (fast and smooth).