Cost-Effective and Feasible Handoff Application for Mobile Phones

Heterogeneous networks with different wireless technologies increase the availability of Internet services (i.e., cloud services). However, latest mobile phones with at least two interfaces only access these services either via WiFi or UMTS/HSPA. From user's view, an optimal use of heterogeneous networks with today's mobile phones includes seamless data transmission using vertical handoff (VHO) solutions. Caused by high technical and economic costs there exist no usable solutions for readily seamless data transfers. To benefit earlier from seamless service provisioning, we present a feasible client based handoff management solution for mobile phones (CSH-MU) with embedded vertical handoff decision algorithm (VHDA) that considers mobile device's power consumption for WiFi and UMTS communication. As proof of concept and for performance evaluation, a prototype is tested on different mobile phones in a real test bed for TCP and UDP based applications. The results show that the proposed solution is not only a feasible, but also a readily usable solution for mobile phones as well as outperforms network based solutions in terms of handoff delay. A further advantage is the costeffective and immediate integration in current mobile phones without requiring any changes in the used wireless network technologies (e.g., UMTS, WiFi).