SOLTA: a service oriented link triggering algorithm for MIH implementations

The emerging Media Independent Handover (MIH) standard proposes to support session continuity during handover between heterogeneous networks. One of the critical features provided by MIH is an Event Service which includes predictive network degradation events, such as Link_Going_Down (LGD), which are triggered based on link layer metrics. Our results highlight the reactivness of media stream quality to network degradation. The point of degradation however, is specific to the characteristics of the class of media streaming service. Many existing event algorithms utilize static performance thresholds which are unresponsive to the requirements of individual application service classes. In this paper we propose a Service Oriented Link Triggering Algorithm (SOLTA) which triggers the LGD and Link_Down (LD) events based on link layer metrics but subject to the performance characteristics of the supported class of service. SOLTA illustrates that for 802.11, it is necessary to have aggressive service class specific, link event triggering. SOLTA also illustrates how a soft path handover approach such as Stream Control Transmission Protocols Concurrent Multi-path Transfer (SCTP-CMT) variant is necessary to support seamless session migration.