A Methodology for Evaluating Vertical Handoff Decision Mechanisms

The proliferation of wireless technologies and their ever increasing popularity and pervasiveness made it possible to have mobile terminals (MTs) equipped with a myriad of network interfaces. It is then becoming essential to offer vertical handoff solutions where users can move among various network types efficiently and seamlessly. A variety of mechanisms supporting vertical handoffs by selecting the best possible network interfaces have been proposed. The evaluation of these mechanisms, however, remains a complicated task and no known proposal is completely adequate to evaluate these mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology for evaluating vertical handoff decision mechanisms. This methodology takes into account the current context, different realistic user mobility models, users preferences, applications requirements as well as wireless access technologies specificities and QoS parameters. The proposed methodology provides an adequate framework to investigate vertical handoff mechanisms (VHMs) and evaluate their performances. Then, we demonstrate our methodology on a VHM called Ubique.