An Application of Linear Programming for Vertical Handover Decision Making

Currently, there are several wireless access networks available to support mobile users. Furthermore, new services have also emerged and aim to allow such mobile users to access the services from anywhere at any time without interruption while moving across heterogeneous wireless access networks. The new services require internetworking and integrated solutions between existing heterogeneous wireless network technologies, e.g., cellular networks and wireless local area network (WLAN). The main objective is to enable the mobile users to access the services with different bandwidth, quality of service (QoS), throughput, and delay while roaming seamlessly. Thus, vertical handover (VHO) is the major concern for such seamless mobility support. This article introduced the linear programming technique used for VHO decision strategies. The proposed linear programming technique aims to provide the optimization result for VHO decision making on mobile devices. The preliminary experiment is conducted by simulation to investigate the proposed linear programming model and the optimization result. The experimental result expresses that the optimized values used for VHO decision making can be obtained by using various network parameters. Therefore, the proposed linear programming can be deployed to support the VHO decision making.