Uma arquitetura de seleção de redes móveis para ambientes heterogêneos

Abstract

The network selection task into heterogeneous technology environments is a difficult problem, and there is not a fully accepted solution or technique employed to reach this goal. In this way, the implementation of new network selection strategies represents a very important development topic, mainly due to its growing demand in vehicular networks, patient monitoring, smart cities, Internet of Things, among other technologies and scenarios involving network convergence. In this context, this work presents an integrated solution for the network selection problem, which provides a real appliable model for environments involving production networks, making minimal changes in their structures. To this end, protocols and software tools are used for network classification, employing decision-making aid methods in a client/server architecture. The proposed solution provides mechanisms that make the network selection transparent to users, requiring low computational resource consumption from mobile devices and offering a completely independence of the network operator. Testbeds have been conducted in order to validate the proposed architecture. The results indicate a real possibility of offering a solution to the network selection problem without incremental computational cost from the mobile device, allowing the user to observe an adequate experience quality concerning the consumption of its network services.