A Metering Infrastructure for Heterogenous Mobile Networks

The next generation of mobile access networks will support different access technologies like UMTS, WLAN, WiMax and LTE. Optimal handover decisions between different access networks have to take various types of information into account, such as the load of possible target cells. However, collecting this information and transporting it to mobility management decision engines is costly in terms of bandwidth. With the authors' flexible Generic Metering Infrastructure (GMI) they are able to collect state information from the core and access networks efficiently. Using the GMI, network operators will be able to control handover decisions for their users.