The use of MADM methods in the vertical handover decision making context

The vertical handover is an important issue in the world of internet. In fact, the use of internet is becoming wider with the diversity of possible offered services, going from emailing, Data and video transfers, to IoT. The number of internet users has reached multimillions of people these last two decades, in addition, they are willing to connect wirelessly anytime and anywhere, to the best available technology, under the Always Best-Connected paradigm (ABC). The mobile terminals are nowadays, equipped with multiple interfaces, allowing them, to connect to any available wireless access technology, and this provokes vertical handovers to happen. The vertical handover is the changing of the wireless access technology (Ex: from Wi-Fi to 4G), unlike the horizontal handover, which means changing the base station or access point, while staying within the same wireless technology. Thus, the vertical handover process needs to be improved, especially the decision phase, which is the most crucial, while the sensors and antennas' technologies are developing very fast, to collect more efficient metrics, to make faster and more precise decisions anytime. Many theories have been used to deal with the vertical handover decision making, like utility function, fuzzy theory, neural networks, artificial intelligence, and Multi-Attributes Decision Making (MADM). Naturally, MADM methods are the most suitable for this kind of decision making issues. Moreover, these algorithms are relatively simple to implement, and are executing fast enough, to ensure a “seamless” handover, without interrupting the services and sessions. The aim of this paper is to investigate which MADM combination is relatively the best, amongst 120 combinations of MADM methods compared.