General-purpose multi-objective vertical hand-off mechanism exploiting network dynamics

Ubiquitous heterogeneous wireless networks demand a general-purpose multi-objective vertical hand-off mechanism taking into account network dynamics as one of its decision attributes. However, to the best of our knowledge, such a mechanism is yet to be devised. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new multi-objective vertical hand-off (MOVH) mechanism that takes into account network dynamics as one of its decision attributes. We customize Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm (MOGA) in this regard. The results obtained from our numerical simulation demonstrate that the proposed mechanism yields better scalability and stability. We also evaluate the performance of our MOVH mechanism against two most popular alternatives: GRA and TOPSIS. This evaluation comprises of both test-bed experiments and ns-2 simulation. The results from both test-bed experiments and ns-2 simulation demonstrate that the proposed MOVH mechanism has significant performance improvement over both GRA and TOPSIS.