Intelligent Seamless Vertical Handoff Algorithm for the next generation wireless networks

With the rapid development of wide variety of wireless technologies, it is envisioned that the future network will be a convergence of various wireless access technologies providing users with the best anywhere, anytime connections to the Internet. In such environment, it is a critical problem to enable a mobile node to intelligently select wireless access networks and achieve seamless handoff performance. This paper proposes a vertical handoff algorithm which enables a mobile node to intelligently select wireless access network among multiple access technologies, synthetically considering network characteristics and status, such as access bandwidth, response time, data loss, network congestion status, etc, along with access cost and received signal strength (RSS). With the proposed algorithm, wireless network utilization can be optimized according to user’s strategy and network conditions, and real-time applications can be maintained without packet loss during handoff process. A prototype system is implemented and experimental results are analyzed.