Context Aware Vertical Soft Handoff Algorithm For Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Soft handoff in WCDMA systems allows multi connection between the user and base stations during handoff, in contrast to single connection in hard handoff. But multi connection flexibility leads to a trade-off between quality of service for the user and the system downlink capacity. The heterogeneous wireless networks consist of WCDMA and WLAN systems, which operate at different frequency with no direct interference. Therefore, a vertical soft handoff between downlink shared channels from WCDMA and WLAN will not suffer similar side effects as the horizontal soft handoff in WCDMA systems. In this paper, we present an analytical framework for vertical soft handoff and propose a context-aware vertical soft handoff algorithm (CAVSH) for heterogeneous wireless networks. CAVSH considers four user and system context parameters such as user required bandwidth, user traffic cost, access network utilization, and signal to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR). The results show that the proposed CAVSH can provide the system with lower dropping probability, lower average cost to the user and higher throughput, as compared with vertical hard handoff.