From Cellular Decision Making to Adaptive Handoff in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Handoff decision making is critical for mobile users to reap potential benefits from heterogeneous wireless networks. This letter proposes a biologically inspired handoff decision-making method by mimicking the dynamics which govern the adaptive behavior of an Escherichia coli cell in a time-varying environment. With the goal of guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS), we formulate a utility function that covers the demands of a user's diverse applications and the time-varying network conditions. With this utility function, we map the dynamic heterogeneous environment to a cellular decision-making space, such that the user is induced by a cellular attractor selection mechanism to make distributed and robust handoff decisions. Furthermore, we also present a multi-attribute decision-making network selection algorithm for any user to determine an access network, which is integrated with the proposed bio-inspired decision-making mechanism. Simulation results are supplemented to show that the proposed method can achieve better QoS and fairness when it is compared with conventional methods.