A Simple and Robust Vertical Handoff Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Mobile Networks

Wireless networking is becoming an increasingly important and popular way of providing global information access to users on the move. One of the main challenges for seamless mobility is the availability of simple and robust vertical handoff algorithms, which allow a mobile node to roam among heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, motivated by the facts that vertical handoff procedure is done on mobile nodes and battery power may be one crucial parameter for certain mobile nodes, a simple and robust two-step vertical handoff decision algorithm is proposed for heterogeneous wireless mobile networks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first vertical handoff algorithm that takes the classification of mobile nodes into consideration, one is resource-poor mobile nodes, and the other is resource-rich mobile nodes. This new feature makes it more applicable in the real world. In addition, dynamic new call blocking probability is firstly introduced by this paper to make handoff decision for wireless networks. The experiment results have shown that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional algorithms in bandwidth utilization, handoff dropping rate and handoff rate.