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With proliferation of the IEEE 802.11 WLAN and the emerging 802.11n standard, the WLAN is poised as a promising ubiquitous networking technology to support VoIP services, which is gaining popularity due to their high cost efficiency. However, the 802.11 WLAN is not designed to support delay sensitive traffic such as VoIP. This problem is magnified during a handover as user roam the WLAN network resulting in excessive handover latency and consequently packet loss. In addition, a 802.11 WLAN handover process is predominantly based on the physical layer detection without QoS considerations. This often causes overloading of access points and consequently all its associated connections would suffer from high delay, resulting in unacceptable QoS for the VoIP services. The former can be resolved by reducing handover latency to achieve seamless handover and the latter can be mitigated by employing link layer detection in the 802.11 WLAN handover process and having an appropriate admission control scheme. In this paper, we proposed an integrated load balancing scheme incorporating (i) QoSbased fast handover to support seamless handover by eliminating both detection and scanning phases from the 802.11 WLAN handover process; and (ii) soft admission control to protect QoS of existing voice connections when resources are low. This synergy guarantees service QoS during and after handover respectively. Simulations showed that our proposed integrated load balancing scheme is capable of providing seamless handover and QoS enhancements in terms of increased throughput, reduced packet loss and bounded delay when considering heterogeneous voice traffic of different packetization intervals. Particularly, our proposed scheme effectuate QoS balance of both delay and throughput which jointly optimize overall system utilization.

Always best connected (ABC) services allows multimode mobile terminals to stay connected to the best available networks, at anytime according to user preferences. One of the key aspects in realizing such ABC service is mainly attributed to an effective and dynamic access network selection process. However, most of the previous works consider the access network selection process as a static optimization problem which fails to address the dynamic QoS conditions intrinsic in wireless networks. One of the main challenges remains as no efficient way in obtaining dynamic QoS parameters such as packet delay, packet loss and jitter. In this paper, we proposed a novel dynamic access network selection algorithm capable of adapting to prevailing network conditions. Our algorithm is a dual stage estimation process where network selection performed using sequential Bayesian estimation relies on dynamic QoS parameters estimated through bootstrap approximation. Simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm which outperforms static optimization approach in a highly efficient manner.978-1-4244-1645-5/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE

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