ANP based vertical handover algorithm for vehicular communication

Vertical handover (VHO) is an essential requirement to provide seamless connectivity in heterogeneous radio access networks (RAN) environment. Intelligent transportation system (ITS), which needs an “always best connected” communication to ensure vehicular safety, is an application of 4G that is characterized by heterogeneous RAN. A novel context aware vertical handover algorithm for vehicular communication is presented here. ANP (Analytic Network Process), which is a multi criteria decision making (MCDM) tool, is used for the development of algorithm and MATLAB/SIMULINK is used as simulation platform. The optimum network is selected, based on multiple factors such as network traffic load, velocity of mobile station, reliability, data rate, usage cost and initial delay of network, among the available networks such as WiMax, WLAN and UMTS. This algorithm is specific to vehicular communication system and hence variation in network selection with vehicle speed is shown considering five case studies.