Integrated Multi-service Handoff Mechanism with QoS-Support Strategy in Mobile Cloud Computing

Mobile devices are becoming the primary platforms for many users who always roam around and access the cloud computing applications. Using cloud computing services extensively and offloading local applications to the cloud, facilitate mobile devices keep multiple services online at the same time. Since the mobile device may move fast and session handoff among access networks comes up frequently, multiple services initiate handoff procedure results in lots of redundant signaling. The current handoff mechanisms only make the handoff control for each service individually, which brings much unnecessary energy consumption and ignores the different Quality of Service (QoS) requirement during handoff execution. To solve these issues, we propose an improved multi-services handoff mechanism, which uses the list method of session initial protocol to make all active services execute handoff together. And considering to support the QoS for each active service during handoff procedure, the differentiate policy for multi-service media transfer is included based on the integrated handoff signaling. Analytic model and simulation are developed to investigate the new mechanism. The results demonstrate that the improved multi-service handoff mechanism can efficiently save energy consumption for mobile devices and realize seamless handoff.