A novel modeling approach for vertical handover based on dynamic k-partite graph in heterogeneous networks

摘要

The future network world will be embedded with different generations of wireless technologies,such as 3G,4G and 5G.At the same time,the development of new devices equipped with multiple interfaces is growing rapidly in recent years.As a consequence,the vertical handover protocol is developed in order to provide ubiquitous connectivity in the heterogeneous wireless environment.Indeed,by using this protocol,the users have opportunities to be connected to the Internet through a variety of wireless technologies at any time and anywhere.The main challenge of this protocol is how to select the best access network in terms of Quality of Service(QoS)for users.For that,many algorithms have been proposed and developed todeal with the issue in recent studies.However,all existing algorithms permit only the selection of one access network from the available networks during the vertical handover process.To cope with this problem,in this paper we propose a new approach based on k-partite graph.Firstly,we introduce k-partite graph theory to model the vertical handover problem.Secondly,the selection of the best path is performed by a robust and lightweight mechanism based on cost function and Dijkstra’s algorithm.The experimental results show that the proposed approach can achieve better performance of QoS than the existing algorithms for FTP traffic and video streaming.