Cooperative Agent Based Vertical Handover Scheme for Heterogeneous Networks

The increasing demand for all time and every where services requires the network operators to integrate different kinds of wireless and cellular networks. To enable this integration, it is important that users can roam freely across networks. But, as different technologies are involved, the problem of vertical handover (VHO) needs to be addressed. Solutions in the literature lack intelligence and are not adaptable for reducing the packet loss and latency involved in the handover. An intelligent technique is needed in order to perform the service continuity. This paper presents a cooperative agent based approach for the VHO. We propose to introduce the agents in the mobile nodes (MNs) and Access Points (APs) to collect the necessary information from the environment. Based on this information, agents will anticipate the handover in order to reduce the handover latency and packet loss. We have defined three behaviors for the agents that will assist us in performing this task.