Towards Location Based QoS-Aware Network Selection Mechanism for the Nomadic Mobile Services

The advances in the area of location based computing will soon make it feasible to predict the availability of wireless networks and their application level Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics along the location and time dimensions. Such predictions are referred to as QoS predictions which are provided by the QoS Context Source (QoSCS) hosted in the fixed network. Herewith we present a network selection mechanism on the mobile device which requests QoS predictions as needed and uses these predictions combined with the current location and time to select the wireless network which satisfies QoS requirements of the services hosted on a mobile device. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme using simulations and compare the results with the other mechanism that only uses information locally available on the mobile device for the network selection. The results obtained from the simulations encourage further system development and prototyping.