A QoE-driven vertical handover algorithm based on media independent handover framework

Abstract

The current mobile network has been developed to a heterogeneous network that is coexistence of different wireless networks such as UMTS (3G), WIFI, WIMAX (4G) and LTE (4G). Since the demand of realtime multimedia services has significantly increased in recent years and Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes more and more important to users, any single wireless network is hardly to maintain good QoE of multimedia service at any time and in anywhere for any users. Hence, in order to achieve the goal, it is necessary to converge different wireless networks to take the advantages of different wireless networks. However, even though IEEE 802.21-Media Independent Handover (MIH) provides a framework for supporting seamless vertical handover (VHO), how to select an appropriate network and when to carry out handover are still the key challenges to maintain QoE of multimedia service. This paper addresses a QoE-driven VHO algorithm based on MIH that aims to maintain multimedia service with acceptable QoE and avoid unnecessary handover in the heterogeneous network. The performance evaluation was carried out to compare with default MIH bandwidth-based VHO algorithm on video service over UMTS and WIFI networks in Network Simulator 2 (NS2). The results showed that the QoE-driven VHO algorithm could maintain better QoE of multimedia service than the bandwidth-based VHO algorithm by considering video content, and initiated VHO immediately when the QoE of multimedia service became unacceptable. Furthermore, Block List (BL) and acceptable QoE policy could avoid unnecessary handover effectively.