Cost-Based CAC with Media Independent Handover for Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

Media Independent Handover (MIH) is a key specification to achieve seamless handover in Mobile Wireless Networks (MWNs). However, Call Admission Control (CAC) and Vertical Handoff (VH) are two important mechanisms for MIH. First, an adaptive CAC is needed in base stations for maximizing high network reward while guaranteeing QoS requirements. Second, an efficient vertical handoff enables mobile stations achieving seamless, fast, QoS-aware mobility in MWNs. Many studies have proposed some approaches to address the issues of CAC and VH, but not consider both at the same time or not consider for the MIH environment. Thus, this paper proposes a MIH-based cost-based CAC for vertical handoff in a loosely-coupled MWN. First, in a base station (BS) the cost-based CAC models the resource occupancy of each wireless network in a MWN as a Markov chain model, and then forms a cost-reward CAC for maximizing network reward. Second, in MS the VH scheme adopts a predictive RSS to predict the moving trend of mobile stations to select the optimal target network. Numerical results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms other approaches in GoS, FRL and the number of vertical handoffs while yielding competitive utilization.