Handover Performance Improvement in Heterogeneous Wireless Network

Abstract

Moving to the next generations of mobile networks means to deal with multi-heterogeneous network dense deployment as there will be no single network type capable of meeting all the rapid changes in customer demand optimally. A major problem is how to efficiently select the network to be handed over by the mobile user to continually maintain the user service with a better degree of satisfaction. It is a complicated task to solve this problem as the selection of an access network in such an environment relies on several factors with various relative impacts, such as the network parameters, the user preferences and the service cost. The network selection process compromises between the number of considered factors and the complexity of the process itself as each network has its own properties, different from other networks, which make a specific network the best solution corresponding to specific mobile user depending on the considered factors when taking the decision. In order to perform the network selection process on a correct base and guarantee the selection of the most suited network achieving satisfaction for the users along with acceptable network performance, this paper proposed an improved vertical handover algorithm (I-VHO) considering various factors combined together in the same scenario including user speed and signal strength with other network parameters for different services while keeping the load distribution for all candidate networks fair enough to maintain the performance as efficient as possible. The proposed handover algorithm is suitable and applicable for a general case of the heterogeneous network consists of different candidate networks and also effective to users differ on moving speed and type of application. A comparative simulation for the proposed algorithm and the previous works is included. The numerical simulation results and discussions are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.