Study of Handover Strategies for Multi-Service and Multi-Operator Ambient Networks

Today's cellular networks make access evaluation and selection based on pre-defined rudiment policies and rules. It works in the current networking environment that is fairly homogeneous. However, it would not be feasible anymore for the heterogeneous networking environment in the future. The future wireless networking environment will consist of diversified radio access technologies. Similar phenomenon could be foreseen to happen for mobile services and business environment as well. In such diversified environment, it is important that users are easily and efficiently able to exploit their mobile devices' multiaccess capabilities. We thus study new distributed handover strategies that perform the access selection according to a richer set of criteria ranging from end user's preferences to network/service provider capabilities. The initial simulation analysis on these new handover strategies for multi-service and multi-operator environment indicates that the new strategies provide improvements in all measured areas of network and service utilization rates, uptime of mobile terminals, and other various connectivity statistics.