Vertical Handover Management Employing Multi-criteria Decision Modeling in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

enabling seamless connectivity in heterogeneous wireless networks and pervasive use of smartphones in daily life require high data speed and always best-connected services. The always best-connected services require fast and efficient vertical handover management. However, providing vertical handover management in heterogeneous wireless networks is a difficult task. Moreover, various issues are present in the current vertical handover management schemes such as inappropriate handover triggering, high handover delay, wrong network selection, etc. To address these challenges, we propose a generic vertical handover management schemes for heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed scheme works in two parts. In the first part, the Mobile Node (MN) dynamically checks the data rate require by the applications running on the MN’s device. If the data rate drops below a predefined threshold, the MN initiate the handover. In the second part, a network selection scheme is developed based on the Grey Relational Analysis (GRA) decision model. The mobile node obtained five different criteria delay, communication cost, jitter, network load, and Bit Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Networking and Computer Application Held on 13 th – 14 th July 2016, in Bangkok, ISBN: 9788193137352 144 Error Rate (BER) from available networks. The GRA decision model ranks the available networks based on the chosen criteria in order to select the most suitable network for handover. Similarly, the proposed vertical handover scheme is tested against the existing schemes used for selecting a target network. The proposed scheme outperform the existing schemes in the context of throughput, handover delay, stay time of the MN in a network, and energy consumption of the MN’s device. Keywords—heterogeneous wireless networks; vertical handover; Grey Relational Analysis