Even though various wireless Network Access Technologies(NATs)with different specifications and applications have been developed in the recent years,no single wireless technology alone can satisfy the anytime,anywhere,and any service wireless-access needs of mobile users.A real seamless wireless mobile environment is only realized by considering vertical and horizontal handoffs together.One of the major design issues in heterogeneous wireless networks is the support of Vertical Handoff(VHO).VHO occurs when a multi-interface enabled mobile terminal changes its Point of Attachment(PoA)from one type of wireless access technology to another,while maintaining an active session.In this paper we present a novel multi-criteria VHO algorithm,which chooses the target NAT based on several factors such as user preferences,system parameters,and traffic-types with varying Quality of Service(QoS)requirements.Two modules i.e.,VHO Necessity Estimation(VHONE)module and target NAT selection module,are designed.Both modules utilize several"weighted"users’and system’s parameters.To improve the robustness of the proposed algorithm,the weighting system is designed based on the concept of fuzzy linguistic variables.
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