Movement-Aware Vertical Handoff of WLAN and Mobile WiMAX for Seamless Ubiquitous Access

This paper addresses a movement-aware vertical (MAV) handover algorithm between WLAN and Mobile WiMAX for seamless ubiquitous access. An MAV handover algorithm is proposed in this paper to exploit movement pattern for avoiding unnecessary handovers in the integrated WLAN and Mobile WiMAX networks. If a mobile station (MS)'s velocity is high and its movement pattern is irregular, unnecessary handovers likely occur more frequently. Therefore, the MS velocity and moving pattern are important factors for the handover decision procedure. To avoid unnecessary handovers, the MAV handover algorithm adjusts the dwell time adaptively and predicts the residual time in the cell of target base station (BS). Consequently, the adaptive dwell timer of MAV handover algorithm allows an MS a better connection as long as possible. Our simulation results show that the reduction of unnecessary handovers by leads to significant throughput improvements.