A Layered Infrastructure for Mobility-Aware Best Connectivity in the Heterogeneous Wireless Internet

The common availability of wireless devices with multiple communication interfaces, e.g., IEEE 802.11, WiMAX, Bluetooth, and/or UMTS, is pushing towards the necessity of novel supports to seamlessly select the proper connectivity technology to exploit at any time. That selection should be context-dependent and consider several aspects, at very different abstraction layers, from application-specific bandwidth requirements to expected client mobility, from connectivity costs and energy consumption to user preferences. The authors claim the need of effective mobility-aware middleware solutions to relieve application logic from the burden of determining the most suitable interface and connectivity provider for each client at runtime.