Context-awareness for heterogeneous access management

[摘要] The increasing availability of both static and dynamic context informationhas steadily been driving the development of context-aware communicationsystems. Adapting system behavior according to current context of thenetwork, the user, and the terminal can yield significant end-to-endperformance improvements. In this paper, we present a concept for how to usecontext information, in particular location information and movementprediction, for Heterogeneous Access Management (HAM). In a first step, weoutline the functional architecture of a distributed and extensible contextmanagement system (CMS) that defines the roles, tasks, and interfaces of allmodules within such a system for large-scale context acquisition anddissemination. In a second step, we depict how the available contextinformation can be exploited for optimizing terminal handover decisions to bemade in a multi-RAT (radio access technology) environment. In addition, theutilized method for predicting terminal location as well as the objectivefunctions used for evaluating and comparing system performance are described.Finally, we present preliminary simulation results demonstrating that HAMsystems that include current and future terminal context information in thehandover decision process clearly outperform conventional systems.

[学科分类] 电子、光学、磁材料