Vertical Handoff Decision Strategy in Wireless Overlay Networks

One of the major design issues in wireless overlay networks is the support of vertical handoff. It is becoming essential to offer vertical handoff solutions where users can move among various network types efficiently and seamlessly. Vertical handoff is the switching process between heterogeneous wireless networks. In this paper, we propose and analyze a novel vertical handoff decision strategy that considers the performance of the whole system. This strategy takes into account the network bandwidth, received signal strength (RSS) and variation of RSS. The performance comparison of the proposed vertical handoff decision scheme and existing scheme shows that the proposed scheme can reduce the handoff call dropping probability.