A fuzzy decision making strategy for vertical handoffs

The main concern of the next generation of mobile networks is the integration of heterogeneous wireless technologies around an IP backbone. However this integration invokes many challenges such as mobility management and handoff decision making. Various approaches have been proposed to deal with handover decision problem, yet handoff initiation and network destination selection remain critical issues which are widely based on the traditional RSS measurements. In this paper, we propose a new fuzzy decision making approach that considers a variety of context parameters to trigger handoffs and choose an optimal network destination with respect to mobile terminal requirements and nearby network capabilities. The obtained results show that the proposed decision making approach maximize user preferences compared to the RSS based decision methods.