A Survey of Handovers Decision Algorithms for Next Generation Wireless Networks

Abstract

With technological advances in the telecommunications sector, everyone around the world would like to be connected seamlessly anytime anywhere through the best network. Making a transition from one network to another and moving between heterogeneous networks is not the only problem that worried specialists, scientific and mobile operators; the concern of QoS is as important as the handoff, The requirements like capability of the network, network conditions, handoff latency, power consumption, network cost, and user preferences must be taken into consideration during vertical handoff. Importance of inter working between architecture requires adaptive approaches to implement the vertical handoff mechanism in 4G wireless networks and produce an effective service for the user by considering handover parameters. In this paper, we analyzed the main approaches for vertical handoff to offer a systematic comparison for new researchers. The survey revealed the need for new approach which satisfy the most important requirements and reduce the HO failure probability and the number of unnecessary handover. I. INTRODUCTION Wireless telecommunication is classified into different generations of network. Each generation revolutionized the field of mobile communication. Wireless technologies were developed with different standards and these technologies offer different data rates, area of coverage and variety of services. To address this problem, the wireless telecommunication industry has been scrambling to define a new air interface for mobile communications to provide a framework for these high mobility broadband services and increase the overall system capacity, reducing latency, improving cell-edge performance and spectral efficiency. Promising ubiquitous network access at high speed to the end users has been a topic of great interest especially for the wireless telecom industry. For the growing user requirements of wireless broadband access and the limitations of the existing wireless communication system4G seems to be the solution [1]. Fourth generation (4G) also called Next Generation Network (NGN) offers one platform for different wireless networks which are connected through one IP core " Fig 1 " . 4G integrates the existing heterogeneous wireless technologies avoiding the need of new uniform standard for different wireless systems. In 4G the integration of network and its applications is seamless therefore there is no risk of delay. While implementing 4G the cost issue needs to be taken into consideration so that users can benefit from this technological development fully. Even though there are plenty of talks about 4G, there is not yet a universal agreed-upon definition of the 4G wireless mobile network up to now.