Exploiting user and network context for intelligent radio network access

The availability of both static and dynamic context information has steadily been increasing in recent years. Accordingly, manifold use cases for this data, especially for consumer services, have been suggested. In this paper, we present a concept for how to use context information for intelligent radio network access (IRNA) purposes. Therefore, a context management architecture (CMA) is proposed that is able to handle context information and its respective providers and consumers efficiently. Since a Heterogeneous Access Management (HAM) imposes high requirements on context quality, especially with respect to availability, accuracy, delay, confidence, and relevance of context data, a context quality enabler (CQE) is integrated into the CMA. Finally, we describe the concept of a context-aware radio network simulator (CORAS) that models IRNA concepts, thus allowing for quantitatively evaluating the impact of user and network context information on simulation results.