Quality of multimedia streaming-oriented handover management solution for mobile applications

Mobility has become a mandatory feature of the future Internet as mobile computing gains increasing popularity among Internet users. The rapidly evolving heterogeneous wireless environment provides a variety of communication resources for the mobile host. In order to fully benefit of these wireless access networks an efficient and quality oriented mobility management system has to be employed. This paper presents an innovative solution for handover management based on an estimation of multimedia streaming quality which considers both quality of service and user quality of experience in the decision making process. The proposed solution aims at improving the user perceived quality in the context of mobile multimedia streaming by efficiently exploiting all the communication resources available to the mobile host. Simulation-based performance evaluation shows the performance improvement, both in quality of service and user perceived quality, when the proposed solution is used compared to other mobility solutions.