User-centric QoE-driven vertical handover framework in heterogeneous wireless networks

© 2016 IEEE. With advances in wireless technology and the increase in popularity of mobile devices, more and more people now rely on mobile devices for multimedia services (such as video streaming and video calls). A mobile device can be connected and roamed to different networks in heterogeneous wireless networks. The Media Independent Handover (MIH) framework is designed by the IEEE 802.21 group to support seamless vertical handover between different networks. However, how to select an appropriate network from available ones and when to execute the handover remain the key challenges in MIH. This paper proposes a user-centric QoE-driven vertical handover (VHO) framework, based on MIH, which aims to maintain acceptable QoE of different mobile application services and to select an appropriate network based on users' preferences (e.g. on cost). Further a user-centric QoE-driven algorithm is implemented in the proposed framework. Its performance is evaluated and compared with two other VHO algorithms based on Network Simulator 2 (NS2) for video streaming services over heterogeneous networks. The preliminary results show that the proposed algorithm can maintain better QoE and at the same time, take into account user's preference on cost when compared with the other two algorithms

Game-theoretic Scalable Offloading for Video Streaming Services over LTE and WiFi Networks

This paper presents a game-theoretic scalable offloading system that provides seamless video streaming services by effectively offloading parts of video traffic in all video streaming services to a WiFi network to alleviate cellular network congestion. The system also consolidates multiple physical paths in a cost-effective manner. In the proposed system, the fountain encoding symbols of compressed video data are transmitted through long term evolution (LTE) and WiFi networks concurrently to flexibly control the amount of video traffic through the WiFi network as well as mitigate video quality degradation caused by wireless channel errors. Furthermore, the progressive second price auction mechanism is employed to allocate the limited LTE resources to multiple user equipment in order to maximize social welfare while converging to the epsilon-Nash equilibrium. Specifically, we design an application-centric resource valuation that explicitly considers both the realistic wireless network conditions and characteristics of video streaming services. In addition, the scalability and convergence properties of the proposed system are verified both theoretically and experimentally. The proposed system is implemented using network simulator 3. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance improvement of the proposed system.111Nsciescopu

Vertical Handoff Target Selection in a Heterogeneous Wireless Network Using Fuzzy ELECTRE

Global connectivity is on the verge of becoming a reality to provide high-speed, high-quality, and reliable communication channels for mobile devices at anytime, anywhere in the world. In a heterogeneous wireless environment, one of the key ingredients to provide efficient and ubiquitous computing with guaranteed quality and continuity of service is the design of intelligent handoff algorithms. Traditional single-metric handoff decision algorithms, such as Received Signal Strength (RSS), are not efficient and intelligent enough to minimize the number of unnecessary handoffs, decision delays, call-dropping and blocking probabilities. This research presents a novel approach for of a Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) model based on an integrated fuzzy approach for target network selection

Towards Viable Large Scale Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

We explore radio resource allocation and management issues related to a large-scale heterogeneous (hetnet) wireless system made up of several Radio Access Technologies (RATs) that collectively provide a unified wireless network to a diverse set of users through co-ordination managed by a centralized Global Resource Controller (GRC). We incorporate 3G cellular technologies HSPA and EVDO, 4G cellular technologies WiMAX and LTE, and WLAN technology Wi-Fi as the RATs in our hetnet wireless system. We assume that the user devices are either multi-modal or have one or more reconfigurable radios which makes it possible for each device to use any available RAT at any given time subject to resource-sharing agreements. For such a hetnet system where resource allocation is coordinated at a global level, characterizing the network performance in terms of various conflicting network efficiency objectives that takes costs associated with a network re-association operation into account largely remains an open problem. Also, all the studies to-date that try to characterize the network performance of a hetnet system do not account for RAT-specific implementation details and the management overhead associated with setting up a centralized control. We study the radio resource allocation problem and the implementation/management overhead issues associated with a hetnet system in two research phases. In the first phase, we develop cost models associated with network re-association in terms of increased power consumption and communication downtime taking into account various user device assumptions. Using these cost models in our problem formulations, the first phase focuses on resource allocation strategies where we use a high-level system modeling approach to study the achievable performance in terms of conflicting network efficiency measures of spectral efficiency, overall power consumption, and instantaneous and long-term fairness for each user in the hetnet system. Our main result from this phase of study suggests that the gain in spectral efficiency due to multi-access network diversity results in a tremendous increase in overall power consumption due to frequent re-associations required by user devices. We then develop a utility function-based optimization algorithm to characterize and achieve a desired tradeoff in terms of all four network efficiency measures of spectral efficiency, overall power consumption and instantaneous and long-term fairness. We show an increase in a multi-attribute system utility measure of up to 56.7% for our algorithm compared to other widely studied resource allocation algorithms including max-sum rate, proportional fairness, max-min fairness and min power. The second phase of our research study focuses on practical implementation issues including the overhead required to implement a centralized GRC solution in a hetnet system. Through detailed protocol level simulations performed in ns-2, we show an increase in spectral efficiency of up to 99% and an increase in instantaneous fairness of up to 28.5% for two sort-based user device-to-Access Point (AP)/Base Station (BS) association algorithms implemented at the GRC that aim to maximize system spectral efficiency and instantaneous fairness performance metrics respectively compared to a distributed solution where each user makes his/her own association decision. The efficiency increase for each respective attribute again results in a tremendous increase in power consumption of up to 650% and 794% for each respective algorithm implemented at the GRC compared to a distributed solution because of frequent re-associations

Network Selection Optimization in a Secured Mobile IP Data Overlay System

The purpose of this thesis to so solve a limitation in the switchover mechanism of a Mobile IP (MIP) client device where it fails to change the active Mobile IP leg in a scenario where the current used path is just marginally good. The MIP client is a Cisco 819 router that provides internet connectivity to end users via an internal radio interface to a public Mobile Network Operator (MNO) and an external modem connected via an Ethernet port. When Mobile IP fails to properly select the active leg, the end user’s experience detriments and is unable to continue normal operation, this is why a mechanism is needed to probe the available networks and to select the best one for the end user. This work studies different vertical handover mechanisms that could be used in this type of environments where not only, not all the participants of the handover selection are radio interfaces; as in this case one interface is an external device, but also where most of the physical information of an interface is not available to use as part of a handover algorithm. This thesis proposes three different mechanisms to choose the best available network at any given time to complement the Mobile IP operation. The first mechanism is based on Round-Trip-Time (RTT), the next mechanism uses immediate throughput as the metric for the network selection and the final proposal is a muti-attribute algorithm where very poor networks will be filtered by their larger RTT values first and only then will the immediate available throughput will be measured. The results show that the three mechanisms provided a decrease in the downtime experienced by the end user where the RTT-based algorithm had the lowest increase in performance and the immediate-throughput-based proposal had the highest increase. The multi-attribute mechanism; while not top performing in terms of less downtime, significantly reduced the amount of time it took to select the new network and thus provides better end user experience

Vertical handover management with quality of service support

For mobile usage of the Internet, new preferences might be desired when considering connectivity and handover between overlapped heterogeneous wireless networks. This work presents a cross-layer vertical handover framework, which includes modules for: multi-criteria decisions that support QoS, soft switching between the multiple interfaces of a mobile device, and a light weight signaling scheme for address resolution. The handover decisions are based on user's configuration, network attributes, and node's context information. A connection is transferred onto a new interface only when it is associated to the newly selected network and ready to take over the traffic. The identity of the mobile node is maintained by leveraging the well-known and widely employed NAT for the purpose of mobility management in a new version that we call Dynamic index NAT. DiNAT supports local and global mobility through hierarchical deployment of anchor points. The network simulator OMNeT++ is used to model the system and test its feasibility.Neue Anwendungen und Dienste steigern die Attraktivität der mobilen Nutzung des Internets und fordern die Beibehaltung der Konnektivität auch beim Wechsel zwischen heterogenen drahtlosen Zugangsnetzen, wobei viele Informationen unterschiedlicher Quellen berücksichtigt werden müssen. Auf Basis dieser Informationen müssen Handover-Entscheidungen getroffen werden, die ein Umschalten zwischen den drahtlosen Schnittstellen bewirken und die Identifikation des mobilen Knotens aktualisieren. Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt ein Rahmenwerk für vertikalen Handover vor, das zudem eine Mobilitätsunterstützung beinhaltet. Es verwendet Algorithmen zur multikriteriellen Entscheidung, die eine breite Reihe von Parametern betrachtet, um so die Kommunikationsdienstgüte (Quality of Service, QoS) für Echtzeitanwendungen bereitzustellen. Darüber hinaus wurde eine Strategie für die stabile und weiche Umschaltung zwischen verschiedenen Schnittstellen des mobilen Geräts entwickelt und eine leichtgewichtige Signalisierung für die Adressauflösung zur schnellen Wiederaufnahme der Datenübertragung vorgeschlagen. Die Dissertation beschreibt den schichtenübergreifenden Handover-Ansatz in drei Modulen, deren Konzept und Funktionalität detailliert diskutiert werden. Handover-Entscheidungen werden auf Grundlage von Benutzerpräferenzen, Netzwerkeigenschaften und Kontextinformationen des mobilen Endgeräts getroffen. Eine Verbindung wird nur dann auf eine neue Schnittstelle umgestellt, wenn diese mit dem neu gewählten Netzwerk in Verbindung steht und entsprechend konfiguriert ist. Für die Aktualisierung der Identität des mobilen Knotens wird der bekannte Mechanismus „Network Address Translation“ (NAT) wesentlich erweitert, was als Dynamic index NAT (DiNAT) bezeichnet wird. Sowohl lokale als auch globale Mobilität werden durch eine hierarchische Bereitstellung von DiNAT-fähigen Knoten unterstützt, ohne dass hierzu ein Vorwissen oder die Kooperation der Nachbar-Netzwerke notwendig ist. Viele solcher Knoten können zur Lastverteilung installiert werden, da die Dissertation einen AuswahlmechanismusWith a variety of new applications and services offered for mobile users of the Internet, new usage plans and preferences in connectivity to wireless networks might be desired. Connectivity anywhere and anytime through switching between heterogeneous wireless networks became common communication scenarios for many users. To maintain the connectivity for mobile nodes and the continuity of their running sessions, handover decisions, a proper switching scheme between the wireless interfaces of the communication device, and the identification of mobile nodes must be managed. This work presents a vertical handover framework including a mobility management solution as well. It employs multi-criteria decision algorithms that consider a wide range of parameters, mainly to support Quality of Service (QoS) for real-time applications, applies a strategy for stable and soft switching between the multiple interfaces of the mobile device, and presents a light weight signaling scheme for address resolution to quickly recover running sessions. The handover decisions are based on user’s configuration, network attributes, and node’s context information. A connection is transferred onto a new interface only when it is associated to the newly selected network and ready to take over the traffic. The identity of the mobile node is maintained by leveraging the well-known and widely employed Network Address Translation (NAT) for the purpose of mobility management in a new version that we call Dynamic index NAT (DiNAT). Local and global mobility are supported through hierarchical deployment of DiNAT-enabled anchor points, with no need for pre-knowledge or cooperation of neighbor networks. Many such nodes can be deployed globally for load sharing and route optimization, where a selection mechanism is used to choose a suitable anchor node for each session of a mobile node. The dissertation introduces the proposed approach as a cross-layer system composed of three modules that handle the mentioned tasks, and provides details on the concept of each. The network simulator OMNeT++ is used to model the system and test its feasibility, as compared to a widely adopted solution for mobility management, running real-time applications while moving

Virtual Mobility Domains - A Mobility Architecture for the Future Internet

The advances in hardware and wireless technologies have made mobile communication devices affordable by a vast user community. With the advent of rich multimedia and social networking content, an influx of myriads of applications, and Internet supported services, there is an increasing user demand for the Internet connectivity anywhere and anytime. Mobility management is thus a crucial requirement for the Internet today. This work targets novel mobility management techniques, designed to work with the Floating Cloud Tiered (FCT) internetworking model, proposed for a future Internet. We derive the FCT internetworking model from the tiered structure existing among Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks, to define their business and peering relationships. In our novel mobility management scheme, we define Virtual Mobility Domains (VMDs) of various scopes, that can support both intra and inter-domain roaming using a single address for a mobile node. The scheme is network based and hence imposes no operational load on the mobile node. This scheme is the first of its kind, by leveraging the tiered structure and its hierarchical properties, the collaborative network-based mobility management mechanism, and the inheritance information in the tiered addresses to route packets. The contributions of this PhD thesis can be summarized as follows: · We contribute to the literature with a comprehensive analysis of the future Internet architectures and mobility protocols over the period of 2002-2012, in light of their identity and handoff management schemes. We present a qualitative evaluation of current and future schemes on a unified platform. · We design and implement a novel user-centric future Internet mobility architecture called Virtual Mobility Domain. VMD proposes a seamless, network-based, unique collaborative mobility management within/across ASes and ISPs in the FCT Internetworking model. The analytical and simulation-based handoff performance analysis of the VMD architecture in comparison with the IPv6-based mobility protocols presents the considerable performance improvements achieved by the VMD architecture. · We present a novel and user-centric handoff cost framework to analyze handoff performance of different mobility schemes. The framework helps to examine the impacts of registration costs, signaling overhead, and data loss for Internet connected mobile users employing a unified cost metric. We analyze the effect of each parameter in the handoff cost framework on the handoff cost components. We also compare the handoff performance of IPv6-based mobility protocols to the VMD. · We present a handoff cost optimization problem and analysis of its characteristics. We consider a mobility user as the primary focus of our study. We then identify the suitable mathematical methods that can be leveraged to solve the problem. We model the handoff cost problem in an optimization tool. We also conduct a mobility study - best of our knowledge, first of its kind - on providing a guide for finding the number of handoffs in a typical VMD for any given user\u27s mobility model. Plugging the output of mobility study, we then conduct a numerical analysis to find out optimum VMD for a given user mobility model and check if the theoretical inferences are in agreement with the output of the optimization tool

Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels

Developing an SDWN Architecture for Wireless Network Engineering to Support a Quality of Experience Aware Handover

The massive growth of data consumption and the variety of wireless technology emergence has made the handover (HO) an attractive research topic nowadays, mainly due to the popularity of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), which allow users to reach high-speed data communication while they are in movement. Moreover, mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones have also become increasingly popular due to their low cost and ease of use, and an increase in mobile device use is expected to accelerate in the coming years, along with the availability and use of applications such as real-time services and online gaming. The traditional HO methods will likely not meet the requirements of mobile devices for modern applications due to the lack of intelligence, lack of awareness Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) requirements of mobile users. We, therefore, introduce a novel architecture that supports horizontal HO in homogenous networks. This architecture is based on the Software-Defined Wireless Networking (SDWN) concept, where the wireless network is controlled centrally and the wireless Access Points (APs) are programmable. In this architecture, HO algorithms will assist wireless users to find the network that could best support the application requirements through Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) management policies. The first HO algorithm proposed in this thesis is called Quality of Experience Oriented Handover Algorithm. This algorithm will guarantee the best possible connectivity to the users in terms of their QoE and QoS requirements and outperforms the traditional methods in a sparse network environment. The second contribution is called Optimised Handover Algorithm for Dense WLAN Environments. This algorithm has been designed to address dense network environments via taking into consideration the Adaptive Hysteresis Value (AHV). The AHV will help the Optimised Handover Algorithm via reducing the so-called ping-pong effect. This contribution shows promising performance results by selecting the best candidate AP, decreasing the number of redundant HO and avoiding the ping-pong effect. The final contribution is called Priority Based Handover Algorithm. We extended our proposed SDWN architecture in order to include the concept of prioritising users and make a smart decision during the process of HO. This algorithm will prioritise a certain class of users to avoid the effect of the over-congestion. The results show that the approach based on priority outperforms the state of the art and provides better QoE to the high priority users despite the over-congestion situation