Context-Aware Mechanism for IEEE 802.21 Media Independent Handover

The IEEE Media Independent Handover (MIH) services are not aware of different user contexts, and thus cannot provide context-aware services to improve user experience. To address this problem, we extend MIH with a context-awareness module. More specifically, we present a context-aware mechanism for generating timely MIH Link Going Down (LGD) event that triggers handover preparation before losing the current connection. Unlike existing works, which focus on signal strength threshold, our proposed mechanism can guarantee user required handover preparation time. Experiment results show that our mechanism can generate timely MIH LGD event.