Flow/Interface Association for Multi-interface Mobile Terminals: e-Health case proposal

A heterogeneous wireless environment is composed of different networks technologies (e.g., LTE, UMTS, and Wi-Fi) each with different coverage and different capacity to cater for diverse service requirements. In such an environment, multiple access networks could be available for a mobile user. The latter can run multiple applications each has its particular Quality of Service (QoS) needs. Hence, it would be advantageous for multi-interface terminals to simultaneously use multiple network interfaces instead of switching from one interface to another to gain in performance. This involves the association of each flow with its suitable network that meets its specific requirements in a way that best maximizes the global terminal utility. Nevertheless, using multiple networks simultaneously may consume more energy than using only one interface. Therefore, the energy consumption should be considered as a criterion in the flow/interface association (FIA). This paper presents a novel method that takes into account network conditions, the monetary cost of the network, QoS requirements of the application, user preferences, and energy consumption of the mobile device to select the optimal FIA which achieves the best trade-off among all the considered criteria. We developed a real health monitoring testbed comprising multiple sensors for medical application to quantify the real benefit of our approach. The obtained results are supported by comparison with other works.