A Comparative study of AHPvsANP models for weighting the Context-awareness criteria process in the radio access network's selection

Nowadays, the wide range of mobile networks introduces more challenging issues in order to meet the continuously increase of application requirements. The interoperability between the different networks gives access to a large number of services when various context criteria are considered in handover decision making. The hierarchy and network analytic process models are able to establish very close priorities for various context criteria. In this paper, we give a proof concerning the appropriate weighting algorithm to be used during the network selection process. We aim to compare the behavior of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Analytic Network Process (ANP) weighting methods. Results show that the AHP model outperforms ANP model since it can avoid unnecessary handover execution caused by bad weighting. The dependency between clusters applied in ANP model does not have a great influence in the network selection decision. Moreover, it is computationally expensive and more complex. As a result, decision delays increase which impacts the handover decision and specially the seamless connection.