Timely Effective Handover Mechanism in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Next-generation wireless networks should be able to coordinate and integrate different communication systems. It has been a challenging problem to support a seamless handover in these diverse wireless network environments. Link level triggers can provide information about events which can help handover decision and layer 3 entities better streamline their handover related activities. In most conventional layer 2 triggering approaches, a pre-defined threshold for a specific perspective such as the received signal strength is used. This may cause too late or too early handover executions. In this paper we propose a new predictive handover framework that uses the neighbor network information to generate timely the link triggers so that the required handover procedures can appropriately finish before the current link goes down. First we estimate a required handover time for the given neighbor network conditions, then using a predictive link triggering mechanism the handover start time is dynamically determined to minimize handover costs. The handover costs are analyzed in terms of the total required handover time and the service disruption time. The numerical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method significantly enhances the handover performance in heterogeneous wireless networks.