Performance evaluation of the context-aware handover mechanism for the nomadic mobile services in remote patient monitoring Pravin Pawar a, * , Bert-Jan van Beijnum a , Marten van Sinderen a , Akshai Aggarwal b , Pierre Maret c , Frédéric De Clercq d a Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands b Department of Computer Science, University of Windsor, Ontario,Canada c Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, Lyon,France d Computer Resources International, Luxembourg, S.A.,Luxembourg a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Available online 9 May 2008 Keywords: Handheld mobile devices Multi-homing Nomadic mobile services Remote patient monitoring a b s t r a c t Owing to the recent advances in the mobile middleware technologies, hardware technologies and asso- ciation with the human user, handheld mobile devices are evolving into data producers and in turn acting as nomadic mobile service providers. For the nomadic mobile service hosted on a multi-homed handheld mobile device, context-awareness provides a capability of selecting the suitable network interface for the data transfer. This paper conducts a performance evaluation of the context-handover mechanism for the nomadic mobile services applied in the remote patient monitoring domain and hosted on a multi-homed handheld mobile device. The experimentation analyzes the suitability of a particular network for the data transfer,the effect of multi-homing on the remote patient monitoring application and the resource uti- lization on the mobile device. The performance analysis provides us useful insights, which are currently being exploited in the extended middleware architecture for the vertical handover support to the noma- dic mobile services. Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Due to the convenience offered by the mobility, portability and connectivity,mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular and they have become an integral part of everyday life. Over the past few years mobile devices such as mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have become more powerful in terms of the pro- cessing capabilities and power, and available memory. Moreover, to- days mobile devices are often equiped with multiple network interfaces, typically we encounter some subset of GPRS, UMTS, WiFi, BlueTooth and Infrared interfaces. Alongwith the above-mentioned technologicaladvances,applications of mobile devices have also evolved. The early generations of mobile devices provided only basic speech-based and text-based communication facilities. However, with the ability of mobile devices to connect to the Internet, a num- ber of applications in the diverse areas such as e-commerce, infor- mation and entertainment are available to their users. In this paper, we consider a service to be a unit of well-defined functional behavior (in syntax and semantics) that is offered by a software entity for use by other software entities [1]. The Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) paradigm allows the flexible service provisioning, service selection and service composition in the Internet.Traditionally,mobile devices take on a service consumer role. However,today these devices have sufficientresources to host services,and thereby have the ability to become a part of the service discovery network. A mobile device in the role of a ser- vice provider enables, amongst others, entirely new scenarios and end-user services. This paradigm shift from the role of service con- sumer to the service provider is also a step towards practical real- ization of various computing paradigms such as pervasive computing,ubiquitous computing, ambient computing and context- aware computing. For example, the applications hosted on a mobile device provide information about the associated user (e.g. location, agenda) as well as the surrounding environment (e.g. signal strength,throughput).Mobile devices also support multiple inte- grated devices (e.g. camera) and auxiliary devices (e.g. GPS receiv- ers, printers). For the hosted services,it provides a gateway to make available its functionality to the outside world (e.g. providing paramedics assistance). In practice, the role of mobile devices as a service provider is being realized by a few technical platforms. For instance,in [2] a proxy-based middleware is presented for the development and deployment of application services hosted on a mobile device.In [3,4] a lightweight infrastructure is proposed to host web services on a mobile device. We name such a service as 0140-3664/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2008.04.020 * Corresponding author.Tel.: +31 53 489 2692; fax: +31 53 489 2287. E-mail addresses: P.Pawar@utwente.nl (P. Pawar), B.J.F.vanBeijnum@utwente.nl (B.-J. van Beijnum), M.J.vanSinderen@utwente.nl (M. van Sinderen), akshaia@ uwindsor.ca (A. Aggarwal), pierre.maret@liris.cnrs.fr (P. Maret), frederic.de.clercq@ skynet.be (F. De Clercq). Computer Communications 31 (2008) 3831–3842 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computer Communications j o u r n a l h omepage: w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / c o m c o m