Context-Aware Management Scheme for service continuity

As wireless access technologies grow rapidly, the recent studies have focused on granting mobile users the ability of roaming across different wireless networks in a seamless manner thus offering seamless mobility. The different characteristics of each wireless technology with regard to Quality of Service (QoS) brought many challenges for provisioning the continuous services (audio/video streaming) in a seamless way. The paper proposes Context-Aware Management Scheme (CAMS) which facilitates service continuity in real-time application such as video and audio streaming. Unlike previous research efforts which focuses on session continuity only while handover and does not account for the characteristics differences between the networks, this work focuses on improving QoS and user experience by adapting the session parameters after Vertical Handover (VHO) according to the new environment and available resources. The new scheme would improve users experience and allow the network to admit more users at the same time compared to non-context aware solutions. In this paper, the architecture of the proposed scheme is presented. In addition, detailed signaling messages of the VHO and Context-Aware Management from WiFi to WiMax and vice versa are discussed.