A mechanism for vertical handover based on SAW using IEEE 802.21

Abstract

Nowadays, there is a lot of devices which are able to access wireless networks through a wide range of access technologies. For a device to move among these heterogeneous networks and stay always connected, mechanisms of vertical handover are needed. This paper proposes a handover decision mechanism using the Simple Additive Weighting (SAW) in a heterogeneous wireless network environment using the IEEE 802.21. The proposed mechanism considers user preferences like cost as parameters of the candidate network to choose the best available network. We present some experiments that use a developed simulator to validate our mechanism. The results of these experiments show that the proposed solution distributes better the mobile nodes among the networks. © 2011 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.