Simulated Annealing For Real-Time Vertical-Handoff In Wireless Networks

When a mobile terminal is moving across heterogeneous wireless networks acting as access points, it must decide the best network to connect to, taking into account the values of the quality of service parameters of the networks. Selecting an optimal set of weights for these values in the terminal is an optimization problem that must be solved in real time for embedded microprocessors that manage the Vertical Handoff decision phase in highly dynamic environments. For this purpose, we have developed an adaptive heuristic inspired on the Simulated Annealing algorithm that improves the performance of a former algorithm designed to solve this optimization problem.