An utility-based interface selection scheme for multi-homed mobile terminals

Current mobile terminals are equipped with several network interfaces, which may be of different access technologies, both wireless and cellular. With multi-homed terminals, it becomes possible to use simultaneously the various interfaces - and not only to handoff from one to another. Furthermore, it becomes possible to associate the suitable interface to each application according to its requirements and other attributes such as network/interface characteristics, terminal capabilities, user preferences, etc. In this paper, we propose an interface selection scheme which defines an interface utility function satisfying the application requirements and economizing the terminal energy consumption. The distance to the ideal alternative (DiA) algorithm is used to rank the interfaces based on the interface utility values and the network side attributes. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed scheme.