An optimized MCHVD approach to curtail handover failures in wireless networks

The applications of wireless local area networks (WLAN’s) are highly accepted by mobile terminals (MT’s) due to their high transmission bandwidth and reduced costs. However, in such high speed networking platforms, there is a possibility of unnecessary handover failure (UHF) due to limited coverage of WLAN’s. Therefore, the given paper provides a multi-criteria hysteresis vertical handover decision (MCHVD) approach for wireless systems in order to minimize handover failure by analysing and validating its performance with conventional received signal strength (RSS) scheme of source and target cells. Using OPNET simulator, the proposed approach is tested over 60 samples, which are divided equally among networks such as Wi-Fi, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX), and Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) based on parameters like G power as 0.8, threshold energy limit as 0.05%, and confidence interval as 95%, thereby keeping the maximum accepted error as 0.05 and beta as 0.2. An independent sample T-test is done, which reveals that the probability of handover failure (p) is 0.01 (p < 0.05), which is found to be statistically significant in the MCHVD approach when compared with the conventional RSS scheme. The results show that the handover failure rate for MCHVD is significantly lower than that for conventional RSS-based methods with respect to 20 iterations.