MOBILITY MANAGEMENT IN HETEROGENEOUS WIRELESS NETWORK USING FUZZY LOGIC

Abstract

The internet has greatly contributed to the world becoming a global village giving everyone the opportunity to have access to information anywhere, anytime. Several wireless networks are available for use, these include Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UTMS), Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), Wireless Interoperability Microwave Access (WiMAX), Fourth Generation Long Term Evolution (4G LTE) etc. These networks have made connection to the internet very easy and they have their strength and weaknesses. Today’s wireless networks, mobile device users are faced with a challenge of choosing the network that provides best quality of service. This has increased the research interest in mobility management in heterogeneous wireless network environment which enhances seamless communication. In the quest to achieve ubiquitous communication system, there is need for an efficient vertical handover system which will be intelligent enough to know when to handover to another network and to be able to select a network that will provide quality service to the user. In this research work, fuzzy logic is used to develop a handover decision model in an heterogeneous wireless network environment and the parameters used are received signal strength, data rate , mobile velocity and coverage area, while Technique Order of Preference with Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) algorithm was adopted for network selection. Four different wireless networks were used in the implementation, these are WLAN, 3G (UMTS), WiMAX and 4G LTE. The project was implemented using Matlab. The system decides whether to handover or stay on the current network based on the value of the handover factor which is a function of the values of receive signal strength , mobile velocity, data rate, coverage area.