Vertical Handoff Provisioning and Capacity Planning in the Deployment of Hybrid Networks

The demand for hybrid networking, in which different access technologies are integrated to support mobile networking, has witnessed significant increase recently. One major challenge in hybrid networking is vertical handoff provisioning. In this paper a mobility-based network planning optimization for hybrid networks is proposed. The optimization objective is to minimize the rate of up-going vertical handoff events and to maximize the total number of users supported by the network. The optimal placement of APs with respect to these two objectives is formulated as an integer programming problem. Our results show that considering the mobility pattern in the planning phase of network deployment can significantly improve the infrastructure performance