Abstract

International audience; Efficient vertical handover mechanisms are required to provide service continuity over available and upcoming heterogeneous wireless access networks. They should provide low delays and good accuracy to meet service requirements. In the literature, proposed mechanisms rely on a rich knowledge of users' ambient environments and contexts. The outcomes are complex mechanisms that require significant amount of resources and processing time. Reputation is a rating concept already used in ad hoc security, social and business fields. It is intended to deliver fast decisions based on the analysis of users' experiences in similar conditions. In this paper, we propose the use of a reputation system to speed up vertical handover (VHO) decisions in complex wireless environments. The proposed approach can be used for initial attachments and VHO decisions. It is based on simplified rating functions reflecting a contextual QoS, experienced by previous users. Discussions and early performance evaluations are provided

Abstract

International audience; To meet the continuously increasing demands and requirements of mobile users, next generation wireless systems are more and more relaying on the coexistence of heterogeneous wireless networks. The objective is to provide any time and anywhere connectivity to users. One of the main challenges in such a heterogeneous environment is mobility management, including network selection and Vertical Handover (VHO) procedures. In this paper, we propose a VHO management solution combining the use of reputation as a Quality of Experience (QoE) indicator for fast decision-making and the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) as a mobility protocol. This reputation-based Vertical Handover solution operates on the previous observed experiences of users within the different available networks to make fast decisions and uses the SCTP protocol that provides multihoming facilities. Performance results demonstrate that the proposed handover scheme provides seamless mobility, with low latency, good throughput and almost no packet lo