An efficient handover decision making for heterogeneous wireless connectivity management

During vertical handover process, considering a network selection based on various Quality of Service (QoS) metrics which indicate the network access performance does not necessarily imply that the chosen network improves or satisfies the users´ Perceived Quality of Service (PQoS). This paper not only investigates all kind of information that can constitute the context-aware during handover decision step but also it defines a handover decision algorithm based on network measurements with taking into account the PQoS. Our algorithm uses the sensitive context criteria which are the key required by each class of service and checks their impact on the performance of the chosen network. Here we develop a new context-aware vertical handover algorithm based on a Multi Attribute Decision Making (MADM) approach and we take into account the PQoS. A perform convergence toward the appropriate network is given by our proposed decision function algorithm which guarantees the end users´ PQoS. Simulation results show that our algorithm reduces the number of criteria based on sensitivity for the context awareness. It also avoids the unnecessary executed handover generated by bad network selection which is computationally expensive and can impacts processing delay.