A Profile Based Vertical Handoff Scheme for Ubiquitous Computing Environment

Specifically ubiquitous computing paradigm is based on seamless connectivity. And also to guarantee the seamless connectivity, an intelligent network management between heterogeneous network interfaces, called vertical handoff (VHO), should be designed. Besides, conventional VHO schemes are based on network information only, and do not provide any service management scheme for seamless service. For this reason, this paper proposes a middleware architecture supporting efficient seamless connectivity with service management. In this architecture, we define modules to perform VHOs in accordance with contexts of services, user intention as well as network information. And also we define profiles used to express the contexts related to the process of VHOs and service management. With the proposed scheme, we can reduce the number of unnecessary VHOs and application failures significantly. This leads to around 130% of enhancement in data throughput, and also 85% of application failures can be reduced. Keyword: vertical handoff, seamless connectivity, application profile, context-aware processing, and ubiquitous computing.