Exploring user's habits and virtual communities to improve IP-connectivity management

A wireless connectivity island is a geographic area covered by a particular wireless ISP. Nowadays, mobile users possessing multi-homing mobile devices can have IP-connectivity almost everywhere, while being on the move. In terms of vertical handover, these users jump from a connectivity island to another that could differ by communication technology, access provider, QoS conditions and price. The mechanisms for vertical handover rely on broadcasted information or on QoS status of the wireless environment to comply with the applications requirements and user's preferences. In this paper, we propose a complementary approach to improve the accuracy and handiness of the network information typically used in the vertical handover solutions. Since the mobile users are not always on the move, we try to identify certain user states in a context-aware manner and trigger appropriated connectivity management tasks. While the user is on the move, we retrieve and store user's connectivity experiences through a route, aggregating time and location to represent a habit. Theses experiences are shared as feedback in virtual communities in order to reach potentially interested people who share similar movements. Moreover, we describe the key points of the implementation of a prototype called wireless footprinting and discuss some quantitative experiments in a testbed with mobile IPv6.