Modeling the Always Best Packet Switching Mechanism

In this work we investigate the performance of the Always Best Packet Switching (ABPS) operation approach. ABPS is a cross-layer wireless communication scheme that enables mobile terminals to exploit its multiple Network Interface Cards (NICs) concurrently. The ABPS software module installed on the mobile terminal determines dynamically the most appropriate NIC to use as single point of access to the Internet, and can switch to another NIC dynamically and transparently to the applications. For the assessment, we propose a performance model based on Markov reward models. Through it, we estimate the availability, reliability and throughput provided by ABPS, a standard SIP-based approach and conventional communication protocol employing a single NIC. Results show the performance improvements introduced by ABPS.