Intelligent autonomous handover in iMANETs

Abstract

Autonomously making good network handover decisions is a complicated process that is fundamentally important in many complex mobile scenarios. In many mobile scenarios it is often infeasible to assume that an end user can be required to intervene and manually perform or verify a network handover decision. For this reason, utilities are required that can specifically manage the network connectivity of mobile nodes, monitoring their constantly changing state and the changing environment around them in order to ensure that the most appropriate connection is utilised at any given time. In this paper we present our Handover Manager that we have developed specifically for use in rescue system mobile networking solutions, such as mountain and coastal rescue, based on our experiences from real use case deployments. In particular we describe the way our solution autonomously manages connections to multiple heterogeneous access network technologies, we provide results from a testbed based analysis we performed and finally we draw upon our experiences to highlight important areas for future consideration that are applicable to our Handover Manager approach and to the wider MANET community in general.