Location-Based Vertical Handovers for Heterogeneous Wireless Systems

Efficient radio resource management in wireless networks is increasingly becoming a necessity as current trends drive towards increased number of users and bandwidth hungry applications and services. In this paper, two concepts for targeting this capacity challenge are addressed: cooperative and localization based radio resource management. In cooperation we refer to the concept of a sole entity responsible for managing radio resources for heterogeneous networking environments, and herein we explore an IEEE 802.11e overlay for WiMAX. If a multimode terminal supports several radio access technologies the question arises, which one should be used for a particular communication? To answer this question, one first needs to investigate which systems are available, and what is the required criteria to select the most suitable network based on service, capacity and current load. This paper includes the notion of positioning information and SINR database to propose a vertical handover between the most recent versions of the standards of WiMAX and Wi-Fi. The results showed that there is a QoS gain of the proposed algorithm, over the traditional power-based handover, translated in the reduction of the number of handovers. The results show as well that there is a trade-off of overall system throughput decrease when using the proposed positioning-based algorithm.