Handover Necessity Estimation for 4G Heterogeneous Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new vertical handoff decision algorithm for 4G heterogeneous networks that significantly reduces handover failures and unnecessary handovers, improving service quality and network efficiency.

Contribution

The paper proposes a multi-criteria handoff necessity estimation algorithm based on travel time and threshold calculation, outperforming existing fixed threshold and hysteresis methods.

Findings

Reduced handover failures by up to 80%

Decreased unnecessary handovers by up to 70%

Improved seamless mobility in heterogeneous networks

Abstract

One of the most challenges of 4G network is to have a unified network of heterogeneous wireless networks. To achieve seamless mobility in such a diverse environment, vertical hand off is still a challenging problem. In many situations handover failures and unnecessary handoffs are triggered causing degradation of services, reduction in throughput and increase the blocking probability and packet loss. In this paper a new vertical handoff decision algorithm handover necessity estimation (HNE), is proposed to minimize the number of handover failure and unnecessary handover in heterogeneous wireless networks. we have proposed a multi criteria vertical handoff decision algorithm based on two parts: traveling time estimation and time threshold calculation. Our proposed methods are compared against two other methods: (a) the fixed RSS threshold based method, in which handovers between the cellular network and the WLAN are initiated when the RSS from the WLAN reaches a fixed threshold, and (b) the hysteresis based method, in which a hysteresis is introduced to prevent the ping-pong effect. Simulation results show that, this method reduced the number of handover failures and unnecessary handovers up to 80% and 70%, respectively.