PRONET: Proactive context-aware support for mobility in heterogeneous access networks

This paper presents a blueprint for proactive context-aware mobility support architecture for heterogeneous access networks called PRONET. In particular, we leverage upon the principles of cognitive networking to support proactive context-awareness for user-centric application adaptation via quality-of-experience (QoE) provisioning. Our proposed architecture is built upon port-based multi-homed mobile IPv6 (PM-MIPv6) solution to support several applications via path diversity. In this paper our contributions are two-fold. Firstly, we identify and present gaps in our research domain related to mobility, QoE, cognitive networks and cross-layer design. We then present our architecture for providing seamless mobility in heterogeneous access networks. Currently, we are in the process of collecting results via our test bed and prototype implementation for 802.11g and HSDPA wireless networks.