Dynamic network selection for optimized use of mobile internet

The Internet gained a high importance in people's daily life during the past years. With the advent of powerful mobile devices as, for instance, notebooks, netbooks, or even smartphones, the mobile use of Internet services grew drastically. One key aspect that is expected to boost the success of mobile Internet even further is the provision of ubiquitous access to Internet services and, in particular, a seamless integration of heterogeneous networks, which provides a transparent selection of the best option for Internet access in any situation. This work proposes a user-centric framework for dynamic network selection to make efficient use of the available capabilities of heterogeneous communications ecosystems and to increase the overall service quality that is experienced by the user. The main focus is on the design of a novel strategy for selecting the most suitable network for each individual application on a mobile device. It allows for bundling different network paths to achieve a higher performance and for deferring application requests, for instance, to wait for access networks that are expected to appear in the future. In addition, a path management concept for seamless handovers between different networks and an approach for concurrent multipath transfer in scenarios with heterogeneous network characteristics are presented.