Seamless Context-Aware Voice Service in the Cloud for Heterogeneous Network Environment

The full coverage of continuous voice cloud services is still an open issue in an overlapping network, particularly with regard to heterogeneously public communication network infrastructures. However, hardly anyone of today´s service providers offers seamless voice call continuity across these networks due to the high technical integration effort and economic cost. Given this backdrop, we present a feasible Virtual Room based Vertical Handoff (VOOH) solution. In contrast to its counterparts, VOOH is a network operator independent solution that only uses the today´s existing wireless access technologies for connectivity purposes. The advantage of VOOH is that, e.g., mobile service providers can immediately provide advantage of seamless voice cloud service without any modifications in the underlying network layers. Besides illustrating the system architecture, we elaborate the operational details of the proposed solution and also analyze its performance based on real implementation over a public network infrastructure. The experimental results demonstrate that the handoff performance of the VOOH solution is not only competitive, but also less expensive compared to similar approaches. Furthermore, a Markov Chain model has been developed to show the effect of an enhanced VOOH solution on the handoff performance as QoS for different traffic loads.