Handover criteria considerations in future convergent networks

Design of Handover mechanisms in converged wireless and wire-line networks where different access technologies overlap are challenging. As the first step, defining the handover criteria for selecting the best candidate among available accesses plays an important role for efficient use of network resources. Different parameters should be considered such as: QoS, load balancing factor and inter technology handover cost. For load balancing the goal is selecting an access technology for a client according to its active sessions in a manner that the set of overlapping accesses can admit the most number of clients. It does not always mean selecting the access with the most available resources. We define the handover criteria according to access characteristics, network load condition and end user preferences. We also consider distributing of different sessions belonging to one user over different access technologies as a new feature. We analyze the effect of our approach in efficient use of resources in different test scenarios.