Supporting resource allocation with vertical handoffs in multiple radio network environment

Vertical handoff means mobility between heterogeneous wireless access network technologies. Hierarchical radio access networks with overlapping cells gives an opportunity to handoff between local area high bandwidth networks and wide coverage cellular data. Vertical mobility combines the capacity of local area networks and the coverage of wide area cellular networks. Resource allocation in this kind of environment has not been yet fully addressed in the current research work. Clearly, additional bandwidth offered by wide-band local area wireless networks opens a new area for network performance optimization. For that, it is needed to understand the processes that have an effect on the system performance. In particular, vertical mobility is usually characterized by handoffs between systems having different data rates. The most critical area for system performance is at the very edge of the cell, where the received signal strength (RSS) varies around the sensitivity threshold of the receiver. Simulation results show the estimates of the delay and general performance in a multiple radio network environment. Generalization of handoff performance between multiple radio networks with different data rates is given with analysis.