Design and evaluation of a handover decision strategy for 4th generation mobile networks

Fourth generation mobile communication systems are characterized by heterogeneous access networks and IP-based transport technologies. Different access technologies give users great flexibility in choosing services, which can be different in QoS support, business models, and service providers. Realization of seamless handovers to the best network section while considering QoS and AAAC (authentication, authorization, accounting and charging), calls not only for seamless handover protocols, but also intelligent handover decision strategies. The contribution of this paper is the design of a handover decision strategy in mobile all-IP networks to support seamless handover scenarios. Methods have been proposed to obtain QoS and AAAC information from candidate networks with minimum signaling overhead. New handover algorithms for wireless local area networks (WLANs) are also presented and evaluated with simulation results.