Context-Aware Mobility Management

in Heterogeneous Network Environments

Peyman TalebiFard and Victor C.M. Leung

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

The University of British Columbia

2332 Main Mall, Vancouver, B.C.

Canada V6T 1Z4

{peymant,vleung}@ece.ubc.ca

Abstract

Context-aware mobility management can provide major enhancements

for future mobile communication systems. Not only it considers device mobility,

but session mobility is also considered. Context-awareness is a key ingredient

in any ubiquitous and pervasive system and provides intelligence to the system,

allowing computing devices make appropriate and timely decisions on behalf of users.

The use of contextual information is essential in optimizing services

in a heterogeneous mobile network environment.

Context awareness in mobile computing refers to internal and external adaptation

of the environment and applications to the context state of each other.

Such systems should adapt to the changes and variations of user’s context such as location,

device status and capabilities, network connectivity and etc.

One of the important aspects of mobility management is the dynamic selection

of the best access network for a multimodal device when there is a need

to perform a handover. Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) is one of the successfully

used methods in the literature to solve decision making problems.

Weighted product method is an MADM method that penalizes the unreliable attributes

in making a decision. WPM is a suitable candidate for decision making in more dynamic situations

since the computational cost is low and does not suffer from ranking abnormalities

as the alternatives change.

In this paper, an algorithm for a context-aware network selection is proposed

that is based on WPM. We argue that the quality of provided context data

is an important factor in making decisions.

Keywords: Access network selection, Context-aware, MADM, Quality of Context, Weighted Product Method

Journal of Wireless Mobile Networks, Ubiquitous Computing, and Dependable Applications (JoWUA),

Vol. 2, No. 2, pp. 19-32, June 2011 [pdf]