An Improved Modeling for Network Selection Based on Graph Theory and Cost Function in Heterogeneous Wireless Systems

The next generation of mobile wireless communications represents a heterogeneous environment which integrates variety of network generation like third generation (3G), fourth generation (4G), and fifth generation (5G). The major challenge in this heterogeneous environment is to decide which access point to use when multiple networks are available. Process of roaming mobile user from one technology to anther different is called vertical handover. In this chapter, the authors propose a new mechanism based on graph theory and cost function in order to determine the best path for the end user in terms of quality of service (QoS) when the vertical handover process is needed. Then, they investigate the impact of some existing weighting methods in order to determine the suitable method which can be coupled with the cost function. The experiments evaluation by using Mininet emulator demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve a significant improvement concerning four QoS metrics: throughput, packet lost, packet delay, and packer jitter for two services FTP and video streaming.