Context-awareness for heterogeneous access management

Abstract

The increasing availability of both static and dynamic context information has steadily been driving the development of context-aware communication systems. Adapting system behavior according to current context of the network, the user, and the terminal can yield significant end-to-end performance improvements. In this paper, we present a concept for how to use context information, in particular location information and movement prediction, for Heterogeneous Access Management (HAM). In a first step, we outline the functional architecture of a distributed and extensible context management system (CMS) that defines the roles, tasks, and interfaces of all modules within such a system for large-scale context acquisition and dissemination. In a second step, we depict how the available context information can be exploited for optimizing terminal handover decisions to be made in a multi-RAT (radio access technology) environment. In addition, the utilized method for predicting terminal location as well as the objective functions used for evaluating and comparing system performance are described. Finally, we present preliminary simulation results demonstrating that HAM systems that include current and future terminal context information in the handover decision process clearly outperform conventional systems.