Performance evaluation of the context-aware handover mechanism for the nomadic mobile services in remote patient monitoring

Owing to the recent advances in the mobile middleware technologies, hardware technologies and association 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 utilization 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 nomadic mobile services.