Risk-aware vertical handoff algorithm for security access support in heterogeneous wireless networks

More intelligent vertical handoff (VHO) algorithms which consider user profiles, application requirements, and network conditions must be investigated in order to provide enhanced performance results for user terminal. Moreover, access risk seems to be the strongest requirement of deployment options for next generation wireless networks; therefore, risk conditions gains a significant attention in our research work. In this paper, a cloud model based vertical handoff algorithm is introduced for heterogeneous wireless networks. The parameters: received signal strength (RSS), cost, quality and mobile speed are considered as inputs of the proposed cloud model based system in order to decide handoff initialization process and select the best satisfaction candidate access point. Also, in contrast to the traditional fuzzy logic based VHO algorithms, the method proposed takes ambient access risk level, which is referred to as risk parameter, as another input to the cloud model based cloud inference system. The evaluation results show that the satisfaction degree of handoff is assured for user, and the performance of security is significantly enhanced for mobile terminal by the algorithm proposed.