An MDP-based handoff decision algorithm for multi-domain heterogeneous wireless access networks

In the development of integrating various heterogeneous wireless access networks, handoff decision is regarded as an important and challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a handoff decision algorithm considering both the link reward of multipath parallel transmission and the handoff cost between different management domains. The model of Markov decision process is used to determine the optimal handoff policy, with the objective of maximizing the expected total reward during the transmission. Compare with other algorithms that only consider the link reward, the proposed algorithm has a higher expected total reward and a lower expected number of handoffs.