  Current handoffs are not designed to achieve multiple desirable features
simultaneously. This weakness has resulted in handoff schemes that are seamless
but not adaptive, or adaptive but not secure, or secure but not autonomous, or
autonomous but not correct, etc. To face this limitation, we initiated a
research project to develop a new kind of handoff system which attains multiple
purposes simultaneously by using context information from the external and
internal handoff environment. We envision a cognitive handoff as a
multipurpose, multi-criteria, environment-aware, and policy-based handoff that
trades-off multiple objectives to reach its intended goals. This paper presents
a conceptual (soft) model of cognitive handoffs using a holistic approach. We
applied the proposed model to identify cognitive handoff performance parameters
and tradeoffs between conflicting objectives. We argue that cognitive handoffs
are the archetype of handoffs for the future Internet.
