A new vertical handover decision based context awareness for ubiquitous access

Abstract

The international deployment of heterogeneous wireless networks is progressing steadily. It can offer unlimited services to mobile users, in order to provide ubiquitous broadband access. At the same time, with the broadband technologies (3/4G) and the releases mobility criterion interconnection problems and interoperability between networks raise a major matter. The handover procedure is a critical challenge to assure such a situation. The most of the previous handover mechanisms show inadequacy when making handover decision by considering a few metrics related to different radio access technologies. Also, with the diversification of the context metrics, it is difficult to find a reliable criterion that ensures the selection of the best candidate network. In this paper, an intelligent handover decision mechanism is proposed based on the context-aware strategy and Media Independent Handover in order to improve not only the continuity of the connection but to reduce the latency, to maximize performance level, to enable seamless handover and roaming from any access network to any other one guaranteeing always best connected.