Exploiting spatial and temporal locality for seamless vertical handover

Seamless vertical handover is a key requirement in heterogeneous wireless networks where different networks are integrated. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced information server (EIS) in the IEEE 802.21 media independent handover (MIH) architecture. We also propose an improved vertical handover procedure in which the wireless channel condition is estimated by exploiting spatial and temporal locality at the EIS. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reduce the vertical handover latency by 13% by eliminating time-consuming channel scanning procedure.