Context-Aware Multi-Criteria Handover at the Software Defined Network Edge for Service Differentiation in Next Generation Wireless Networks

The densified deployment of heterogeneous networks coexisting with a variety of overlapping cells has emerged as a viable solution for next generation wireless networks. Despite numerous advantages, the heterogeneity and denseness also raise complicated handover management issue. Nonetheless, most existing handover methods generally depend on one or more objective attributes, and rarely consider the subjective demands of personalized users and specific applications that demand differentiated services. Through decomposing the control plane and data plane, software defined network(SDN) offers a flexible architectural paradigm to overcome these challenges. In this article, we first develop an SDN-driven handover architecture that is capable of perceiving global network status and requirements from various perspectives, including the physical layer, users, and applications. Then, a context-aware multi-criteria handover mechanism is developed in the SDN edge to provide differentiated services. Considering the numerous complicated factors, the handover decision is made based on a hierarchical fuzzy inference system to process diverse attributes and vague requirements described in natural language. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme through a combination of extensive simulations and real-world experiments. The results demonstrate that our solution outperforms the baseline handover schemes, more efficiently providing differentiated services with respect to throughput, bandwidth cost, and application satisfaction, and is efficient and feasible in practice.