Abstract—In heterogenous wireless networks, as the users move across the coverage regions of possibly-different wireless networks, they will have to switch between them. The procedure followed to determine when and how a mobile user should switch between networks of different types is known as the vertical handoff scheme. Several vertical handoff schemes have been proposed in the literature, but few of them employ the geographical nature of this problem like we do in this paper. The scheme we propose here takes the user’s direction of movement into account when choosing the most suitable candidate for the handoff. When compared with existing schemes, our proposed scheme shows significant reductions in the number of lost connections and the number of unnecessary handoffs.

Index Terms—heterogenous wireless networks, vertical handoff scheme, mobility model  

Cite: Abdelnasser Banihani, Mahmoud Al-Ayyoub, and Ismail Ababneh, "A Direction-Based Vertical Handoff Scheme," Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 278-286, August 2013. doi:10.4304/jetwi.5.3.278-286