RSS Measurement for Vertical Handoff in Heterogeneous Network

Next generation wireless network is envisioned as a convergence of different wireless access technologies providing the user enhanced connection any where any time to improve the systems resource utilization. It is likely that WLAN/HIPERLAN will become an important complementary technology to cellular networks and typically used to provide hotspot coverage where there is a high density of users. In such converged systems, co-existence of heterogeneous access technologies with largely different characteristics like data rate for cellular network (2 Mbps), WLAN 802.11b (11 Mbps) and HIPERLAN (54 Mbps) results in handoff asymmetry that differs from the traditional intra-network handoff (horizontal handoff). The seamless and efficient handoff between different access technologies (vertical handoff) is essential and remains a challenging problem.