A Concept for Context-aware Multihoming with Heterogeneous Radio Access Technologies

There are several radio access technologies providing connectivity for mobile devices. In the future, more and more mobile devices will be capable of supporting more than one access technology. For being able to use these technologies simultaneously, there is a need for multihoming capabilities. Due to the variety of access technologies and the ability to use them simultaneously, new concepts for managing multihoming are needed. Higher requirements on efficiency and user satisfaction put new challenges on decision processes for multihoming. These higher requirements can be met by incorporating context information in the decision process. To enable context-based decisions, there is the need for determining, acquiring, and managing the required context information as well as the need for a decision scheme facilitating this information.