Maximizing the reliability of dual homed, critical services in wireless/cellular networks

In the modern society the wireless access to any service has become a commodity. However, various services have different dependability requirements. For critical services the reliability, i.e., the probability for an uninterrupted service, is utmost important. In wireless/cellular networks the execution of handover is one of the key mechanisms to provide an uninterrupted service for a mobile user. Dual homing may be utilized to increase the service reliability where disjointed access points are used for the two connections across possible different access technologies and network operators. The novelty of this paper is how a shortest path algorithm is used to efficiently find the (near-)optimal selection of access points along a projected route for a dual homed critical service. This optimization for reliability takes the radio connections, including handovers, and backhaul network into account. Backhaul network may be composed of a web of autonomous sub-networks made up of different technologies and layers, for instance SDH over an optical network layer.