Ken Murray, Rajiv Mathur & Dirk Pesch

Network Access and Handover Control in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks for Smart Space Environments

Adaptive Wireless Systems Group
Department of Electronic Engineering
Cork Institute of Technology

Future smart environments will feature multiple radio access technologies that need to seamlessly integrate to form a heterogeneous wireless access network. On the arrival of a service request from a smart space user, the network must assign one of the available access networks based on either operator policies or user preferences or a combination of both. Selecting the most optimal network from those available and controlling network access is an important consideration for overall network stability and QoS provisioning. In this paper we propose a policy based management system to control network access and a fuzzy logic based inter-system handover decision algorithm for future heterogeneous wireless networks. A call admission policy allocates a network to a service request based on the current load and service mix in each available network, while the fuzzy logic controller focuses on inter-system handover initiation so as to maintain satisfactory QoS to the end user.