Abstract
The vision of next-generation wireless networks is based on the heterogeneity of different types of radio access technologies such as LTE/LTE-Advanced, WiMax, and Wi-Fi to achieve the demand of high data rate and good quality of service (QoS) to support multimedia streaming at accuracy levels. As a significant key toward achieving this objective, vertical handover management schemes have been broadly treated in the literature. This later mechanism could be redefined as a process of reallocating resources as result of roaming user from one technology to another. Therefore, the addressed issue is not only how to ensure a seamless mobility and end-to-end QoS guarantee but also how to reassign resource when requested and use all offered capacity without underuse it or overuse it. In this context, we propose a new scheme that involves vertical handover process and resource control mechanism by explicitly using multiple challenges to achieve a load balancing among available radio access technologies in order to improve average system utilization. From the radio resource management point of view, our optimized vertical handover procedure has the three following phases: 1) resource allocation estimation; 2) radio resource allocation decision; and 3) radio resources allocation and allocation notification. Detailed simulation analysis illustrates that our scheme is not complex as well as its ability to provide good performance in terms of overall QoS satisfaction in the system.