SAVA: A Novel Self-Adaptive Vertical Handoff Algorithm for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The next generation wireless networking (4G) is envisioned as a convergence of different wireless access technologies with diverse levels of performance. Vertical handoff (VHO) is the basic requirement for convergence of different access technologies and has received tremendous attention from the academia and industry all over the world. During the VHO procedure, handoff decision is the most important step that affects the normal working of communication. In this paper, we propose a novel vertical handoff decision algorithm, Self-Adaptive VHO Algorithm (SAVA), and compare its performance with conventional algorithms. SAVA synthetically considers the long term movement region and short term movement trend of mobile hosts, and achieves a good integrative handoff performance.