Vertical Handover Decision in an Enhanced Media Independent Handover Framework

Vertical handover decision making is one of key problems in heterogeneous network environment. In IEEE 802.21 standard, a Media Independent Handover (MIH) framework is presented to facilitate handover with measurements and triggers from link layers. However, vertical handover decision making can benefit from the information more than link layers. In this paper, an Enhanced Media Independent Handover (EMIH) framework is proposed by integrating more information from application layers and user context information. Given such information, the issue becomes how to select a favorite network. In this paper, two novel weighted Markov chain (WMC) approaches based on rank aggregation are proposed, in which a favorite network is selected as top one of rank aggregation result fused from multiple ranking lists based on decision factors. The proposed approaches can easily integrate a priori knowledge and/or human experiences into vertical handover. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.