Tradeoff analysis for vertical handover between UMTS-WiFi enhanced by IEEE802.21

Mobile communication systems are equipped with multiple network interfaces. Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) and 3^rd Generation (3G) are the most widely implemented interfaces in the latest mobile communication devices and therefore being able to fulfil most of the computing aspects. Nowadays, most modern mobile devices suffer from the interoperability between the WiFi and 3G interfaces, each access technology serves the user independently and therefore these technologies suffer the lack of interworking mechanisms and service continuity. In this paper, we carried out an intensive simulation analysis for the integration between WiFi from the 802 family of standards and UMTS as 3G cellular network. This integration is enhanced by IEEE802.21 standard that facilitates handover between heterogeneous networks by presenting media independent handover (MIH) reference models for different link layers technologies. The main objective is to study the impact of the mobile node speeds and applications bitrates on the key performance metrics in vertical handover scenarios. This study will present the importance of considering the mobile node speeds and applications bitrates in the vertical handover scenarios by observing the behavior of the performance metrics that affect the Quality of Service (QoS). In the proposed vertical handover scenarios, the recommended range of speeds and bitrates were precisely identified according to the acceptable values of the performance metrics defined by International Telecommunication Union - Telecommunication (ITU-T).