Social-connectivity-aware vertical handover for heterogeneous wireless networks

Vertical handover mechanism for a WLAN-cellular heterogeneous network could be made efficient with the use of context aware admission control strategy. Existing admission control methods aim to provide satisfactory quality of service, but rely solely on the availability of wireless resources in the target network. We propose that the admission control in WLAN should make use of social connectivity context of users in its coverage area to classify local and global traffic. In this paper, we introduce a novel Social-Connectivity-aware Vertical Handover (SCVH) scheme, which performs admission control using connectivity graph data from the online social networking services. A higher importance of visiting node for users resident in WLAN, advocates a higher priority for granting admission. We employ graph-theoretic concept of centrality to calculate the social importance of potential handing-over nodes. By giving handover precedence to higher-centrality nodes, we achieve an optimal allocation of wireless resources in addition to improved quality of service. The proposed handover strategy offers an additional advantage of reducing global social network traffic. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.