Multipurpose mobility services for the Future Internet

Abstract

Mobility and handoff management is a key problem of the Future Internet. Current solutions provide mobility services, such as seamless mobility, adaptive mobility, and always-best-connected (ABC) mobility. The problem is these services achieve different purposes, work separately, and ignore conflicts between them; thus, they may improve one purpose and worsen others, yielding an erratic global behavior. In this article, we propose a new multipurpose mobility service that integrates multiple mobility services and supplies a fair balance between all the objectives to meet. As a proof-of-concept, we integrate the seamless, ABC, and adaptive mobility services, which have objectives in conflict. We formulate a multi-objective handoff optimization problem, which grades as NP-Hard. We develop a heuristic handoff algorithm, which provides near-optimal and balanced solutions. Finally, we evaluate the algorithm through random samples of simulated handoff scenarios, which provide hit rates over 90%.