Context-Aware Mobility Management in Heterogeneous Network Environments

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.