Achieving Human-Aware Seamless Handoff

Abstract

Smartphones have spawned a new generation of people-centric sensing applications, where their sensors gather information from users to achieve a wide range of objectives, from fitness monitoring to the urban-wide management of traffic. The connections between devices are of utmost importance for these systems, in fact, switching between the multitude of network interfaces available to smartphones (3G/4G, WiFi) can be beneficial to improve connectivity, the distribution of network traffic and save battery power. Current solutions in the literature for the management of network interfaces are limited in the sense that they only consider either application requirements or the system's status. In this paper, we propose a new model that considers not only these aspects but also the human-context, that is, the user's position and activity to intelligently manage which interfaces should be used. To support the switching between different interfaces without interrupting existing connections, we also discuss several handoff techniques. Finally, we present an experimental evaluation of our model based on Multipath TCP.