Optimal vertical handover control policies for cooperative wireless networks

Inter-operability between heterogeneous radio access technologies (RATs), in the sense of seamless vertical handover (VHO) support with common radio resource management (CRRM) functionalities, has recently attracted a significant research attention and has become a prominent issue in standardization fora. In this paper, we formulate the problem of load balancing between cooperative RAT's as a mathematical program and by trading off a pre-defined delay tolerance per request we propose a vertical handover batch processing (VHBP) scheme. To quantify the performance of the proposed VHBP scheme we compare it with a baseline processing scheme, where each VHO request is processed independently under a number of different network scenarios. Numerical investigations reveal significant net benefits of the proposed scheme compared with the baseline, both in terms of achieved load balancing levels but also with regard to the acceptance rate of the VHO requests.