Perceived Quality of Service and Context Awareness Strategy for Heterogeneous Wireless Connectivity Management

Abstract:
High flow rates provided by future cellular networks have given access to a large number of new communication services presenting different required quality features. The number of metrics defining network access performances has a great influence on the management of the heterogeneous wireless connectivity, and the handover making decision mechanism. Things that are pushing toward the necessity of seamless autonomic selection of the proper connectivity network at any time. In this context, our approach was to introduce a threshold value of sensitive context criteria which has a great impact on the users Perceived Quality of Service (PQoS). We develop a novel context-aware vertical handover algorithm based on a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) approach which takes into account the PQoS. Simulation results show that our algorithm avoids unnecessary triggered handover, generated by bad network selection which is computationally expensive and impacts processing delay, by discarding the candidate network that does not satisfy a minimum resource to establish a connection nor a QoS required.