The QoS-Ensured Vertical Handoff Decision in Heteroge- neous Wireless Networks*

The multi-criteria vertical handoff algorithm plays an important role in heterogene-ous wireless networks. There are two drawbacks in the available multi-criteria vertical handoff algorithms. The conventional algorithms don't give the feasible method to de-termine attribute weight values, and the decision attributes are not mutually independent, which is not considered in the available multi-criteria decision algorithms. These factors make it challenge to select the QoS-ensured network for vertical handoff in heterogene-ous wireless networks. This paper proposes a method to determine weight values of each attribute according to the importance degree by using analytic hierarchy process. In order to eliminate the interaction among various criteria, we also propose a novel principal component extraction method based on principal component analysis, which can rapidly choose the QoS-ensured network with lower compute cost by only using less of the syn-thetic components. Extensive empirical studies are also conducted to illustrate the per-formance improvement of our proposal compared with previous schemes, which shows that the proposed vertical handoff decision algorithm can effectively eliminate the inte-raction among the original decision attributes, and extract the principal components (On-ly the first two principal components are able to seize 98 % criteria information of the original decision information.). This algorithm can accurately select the QoS-ensured network with fewer principal components