Reducing Delay during Vertical Handover

The next generation of wireless networks will provide heterogeneous wireless technologies to a mobile user, in which they can move using terminals with multiple access interfaces and non-real-time or real-time services. The most important issue in such environment is the Always Best Connected (ABC) concept allowing the best connectivity to applications anywhere at any time. With the growing of communication world lot of research is carried out in the field of wireless networks specifically next generation networks. The integration and interoperability of various wireless networks will lead to number of challenges. One of the challenges is the handovers across various/heterogeneous wireless networks as well as reduction of call drop probability. Number of researches has proposed solutions for this challenge. This paper proposes a solution to this problem for the improvement of end-to-end Quality of Service supporting high data rates, real time transmission over wide area and enabling users to specify their personal preferences using Markov Decision Process (MDP). The proposed method uses delay as its basic parameter to select a network during handovers. The selection of the network amongst the existing wireless network considers the ongoing application of the user during the handover. Through simulations we show that our algorithm reduces call drop probability and satisfies user's requirements.