A Handover Management Scheme Based on User-Preferences and Network-Centric Approach

Abstract

With the increase in a number of access technologies and data rates, a continuous connection among different networks is demand of the future wireless networks. In the last decade, user connectivity among different access networks remained a challenging job. Therefore, in this article, we proposed a user-centric and user-perspective based network selection mechanism for fast handover management in heterogeneous wireless networks. The proposed scheme selects the most appropriate network among available networks on the basis of resources i.e. cost, data rate, and link quality. Initially, we load the Media Independent Information Service (MIIS) with the information of cost and data rate provided by different network operators. Similarly, Mobile Node (MN) is also loaded with the user preferred cost and data rate for different applications. The MN obtains the information of cost and data rate from MIIS server upon a predefined threshold, and make a decision for handover according to its current cost and data rate. Furthermore, we employ an optimal threshold mechanism for initiation of the handover execution phase to minimize false handover indications. The proposed scheme is based on a survey for network selection and its implementation in C programming language to validate its performance and accuracy. The simulation result shows that the proposed scheme performs superior then the schemes present in the current literature.