Autonomic-Oriented Architecture for an Intelligent Handover Management Scheme

In the new area of heterogeneous wireless environments, roaming users with multi-interface mobile terminals should benefit from the best connectivity to services anytime and anywhere. To reach this goal, a handover management solution is needed. In this paper, we propose a mobile centered scheme in order to bring intelligence and autonomicity aspects. Our scheme is based on an autonomic-oriented architecture which is able to adapt dynamically to environment changes. It contains three main planes : the knowledge, the piloting and the control planes. The knowledge is defined as the context environment (access network availability, mobile's movement, QoS parameters, user preferences, etc.). The piloting system, driven by the knowledge, provides flexibility and efficiency thanks to advanced decision algorithms and policies governing the whole decision process. Thus, the appropriate control mechanism (i.e. the target access network) is selected while satisfying user and system requirements and ensuring service continuity for the demanding service..