Reducing handover metrics for access network selection in heterogeneous wireless networks

Nowadays, with the evolution of the mobile devices towards a multimode architecture, the users have the opportunity to utilize a wealth of services across a multitude of radio access technologies (RAT´s). Variety of vertical handoff algorithms (VHA) have been proposed to help the user to select dynamically the best access network (BAN) in terms of quality of service. However, due to nature of VHA which is NP-Hard problem, the objective of this paper is to provide an optimal network selection algorithm that allow mobile users to choose the BAN with seamless manner. The optimized algorithm exploits a minimum of criteria and combines two multi attribute decision making (MADM) methods such as analytic network process (ANP) method to find the weights of the available networks, and the the grey relational analysis (GRA) method to rank the alternatives. Simulation results are presented to evaluate our optimized network selection decision.