QMS-Quality of Multimedia Streaming metric for soft-handover in heterogeneous wireless environments

Handover management becomes an increasingly important component of the emergent mobile Internet by maintaining mobile user´s data sessions alive in the presence of user mobility. The great impact handover has on Quality of Service makes it a crucial factor in maintaining mobile user´s Quality of Experience at a high level. This paper evaluates the Quality of Multimedia Streaming metric proposed by the authors in a previous paper. Quality of Multimedia Streaming is a comprehensive and flexible metric for estimating the amount of traffic each network can hold. Unlike the traditional handover algorithms which select the best network, the investigated solution estimates the capacity of each network and dynamically distributes the application traffic over the available networks accordingly. The simulation-based evaluation outlines the performance of the proposed metric and evaluates its parameters for best performance in term of user Quality of Experience.