The transition from 3G to 4G has been a gradual process all these years and in developing countries like India, the change has to span even longer. Eventually, at lot of places while moving we come across signal variations which force the handoff to be decided. The handoff may be vertical or horizontal but it has to be seamless and service continuity cant be ignored anytime. This research proposes a handoff mechanism which takes certain parameters like RSS, node-speed, network cost, network latency, bandwidth and throughput before deciding the handover. This research does a simulation in MATLAB to analyze the effect of these parameters on handover decision both in homogenous and heterogeneous networks. The simulation virtualizes a scenario where a node moving in a geographical region experiences multiple handoffs both vertical and horizontal, based on the above-mentioned parameters. The simulation successfully proves that the proposed methodology performs seamless vertical and horizontal handoffs. The simulation is performed on two different scenarios where the former does handoff between 3G and 4G networks (vertical handoff) and the latter takes a WIMAX and 4G LTE network into consideration. The results are presented in terms of RSSI, throughput and bandwidth and performance of LTE is compared with 3G & WIMAX technique. The performance of the technique has been represented graphically each graph showing variation in handoff decisions for different values of a particular parameter
Performance evaluation of Vertical Handoff Algorithms