Towards a Cognitive Handoff for the Future Internet: A Holistic Vision

Current handoffs are not designed to achieve multiple desirable features simultaneously. This weakness has resulted in handoff schemes that are seamless but not adaptive, or adaptive but not secure, or secure but not autonomous, or autonomous but not correct, etc. To face this limitation, we initiated a research project to develop a new kind of handoff system which attains multiple purposes simultaneously by using context information from the external and internal handoff environment. We envision a cognitive handoff as a multipurpose, multi-criteria, environment-aware, and policybased handoff that trades-off multiple objectives to reach its intended goals. This paper presents a conceptual (soft) model of cognitive handoffs using a holistic approach. We applied the proposed model to identify cognitive handoff performance parameters and tradeoffs between conflicting objectives. We argue that cognitive handoffs are the archetype of handoffs for the future Internet. Keywords-Cognitive handoff; future Internet; holism