An Adaptive Vertical Handover in Service Specific Overlay Networks

This paper proposes a new vertical handover (VHO)-enhanced mobile service discovery and composition method over a hybrid service overlay network (H-SON). The overlay considers the dynamic characteristics of mobile nodes in the decision for node placement as well as the types of services provided and Quality of Service (QoS) levels. The mobile nature of media clients provokes a necessity to consider VHO operations to meet the requirements of offered service level agreements (SLAs). The integrated framework continuously derives optimal VHO configuration policies with respect to handover initiation and network selection for service specific overlay network (SSON) node migration. The VHO-enhanced service composition method allows for efficient, accurate, and QoS-aware component service discovery, composition, and execution. We demonstrate that our approach provides better performance and reduced composition delay in heterogeneous network environments when compared to other service-composition solutions.