An effective vertical handoff scheme supporting multiple applications in ubiquitous computing environment

Abstract

An intelligent network management should be designed to satisfy all the requirements of applications designed for ubiquitous computing environment. Recently there may be several heterogeneous network interfaces in the same location, where a mobile terminal needs switching from one wireless interface to another. However, most of vertical handoff mechanisms are based on the network information or requirements of any single application. Thus, they cannot perform vertical handoff (VHO) at the right time and do not satisfy all the applications running on any mobile terminal. To overcome this problem, we propose an efficient scheme to solve multi-application situation by designing application manager and VHO decision manager. The proposed scheme performs VHO after checking the quality of service (QoS) in factor by factor. Factors of the abstracted profile are used to verify the QoS of networks. By performing VHO in this way, we can design an effective handoff decision algorithm and consequently this algorithm provides a multi-application oriented and QoS enhanced VHO scheme.