The impact of mobile speed on vertical handover process between WiFi and WiMAX networks

Abstract

In mobile communications, seamless mobility is needed among heterogeneous wireless networks. Service continuity can be maintain by using an accurate vertical handover scheme. IEEE 802.21 standard facilitates handover between heterogeneous networks by presenting media independent handover (MIH) reference models for different link layers technologies. In this paper, we carried out a comprehensive analysis for the key metrics that affects the Quality of Service (QoS) during the vertical handover between WiFi and WiMAX networks. The main objective is to study the effect of the mobile speed on these metrics to measure the performance of vertical handover process through the interoperability between WiFi and WiMAX networks using MIH. The simulation results can help the network designers to implement algorithms such as multi criteria decision-making (MCDM) algorithms in MIH framework to enhance the vertical handover process and consider the mobile speed in the design.