Analysis of Load Dependency of Handover Strategies in Mobile Multiaccess Ambient Networks

Wireless operators incorporate multiradio access technologies aiming at expanding their customer base and benefiting from synergies of existing and planned infrastructure. The result is areas with overlapping radio access technologies, enabling users to select from a large pool of available connections, based on several criteria. In these increasingly complex scenarios the importance of handover decisions cannot be underestimated. We study three different handover decision strategies, focusing on the tradeoff between continuous connectivity, network utilization and performance, and the associated costs, and compare them to the optimal strategy. We motivate the need for a distributed algorithm, especially when considering the deployment of multimedia applications, and reflect on the effective network capacity as a function of the handover strategy employed and the permitted offline time for the active mobile nodes in the network.