Simulator-Assisted Joint Service-Level-Agreement and Vertical-Handover Adaptation for Profit Maximization

This paper presents a novel paradigm to jointly fine-tune service-level-agreements (SLAs) offered to mobile users and adapt accompanied vertical-handover (VHO) operations in future multi-technology wireless environments. In contrast to existing, statically configured, VHO schemes that lack the ability to quickly adapt to changing network loads, the proposed framework continuously derives optimal VHO configuration policies with respect to handover initiation and network selection. In addition, the proposed work reconfigures the newly created SLA instances offered to the new users according to network conditions with the objective of maximizing the service provider monetary profit. To achieve these goals, we derive a new model for VHO-based SLA that incorporates service guarantees during the transient phase of the VHO operation. Next, we present a generic model for the control and adaptation of any VHO scheme through the adoption of various types of policies. These models are incorporated in a novel architecture that relies on a policy-based real-time simulator as its core component for system adaptability. Performance evaluation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.