Autonomic personalized handover decisions for mobile services in heterogeneous wireless networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present an autonomic management method to provide personalized handover decisions for customized mobility management in heterogeneous wireless networks. A handover decision is a significant problem, especially in a heterogeneous network environment. This is exacerbated when the goal is to provide personalized services for mobile users. Personalized handover decisions should not only consider received signal strength, which is a traditional handover decision factor, but also context information, user preferences, user profiles, and other non-functional requirements. We present two metrics for evaluating access points: access point acceptance value and access point satisfaction value. Our algorithm uses a combination of functional and non-functional metrics to select the access point that has the maximum satisfaction value. In our simulation study, we show that our decision algorithm is better than other decision algorithms in terms of end user satisfaction. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.