A concept for context-enhanced heterogeneous access management

The heterogeneity of today´s wireless access possibilities imposes challenges for efficient access and resource management across different radio access technologies (RATs). With upcoming 4G technologies and emerging mobile cloud computing, concepts such as fixed mobile convergence are driving the evolution toward comprehensive network management approaches. The proposed context-enhanced heterogeneous access management (HAM) concept accounts for network, terminal, and user context while simultaneously trying to accommodate users, facing different environmental conditions, with the best possible end-to-end performance. To quantify the potential benefit of incorporating context information, we present preliminary simulation results demonstrating that context-enhanced HAM systems will clearly outperform conventional systems.