Improvement of Handover Performance Based on Bio-Inspired Approach with Received Signal Strength and Mean Opinion Score

In mobile communication environments, handover is a very important process to maintain mobile host’s connections to the network. Although a lot of researchers have tried to improve the handover performance, little deployment to satisfy the users can be seen in the real network due to the modification costs. In the current age, the existence of network with different radio access technologies has created a heterogeneous environment. Moreover, the mobile hosts available to users are becoming more sophisticated, which opens the opportunity for end-point approaches to alleviate the deployment issues. Furthermore, real-time applications such as VoIP and video conference are delay and quality sensitive, but not much research has considered qualitative requirement. Hence, a suitable technique is needed to alleviate the deployment issues as well as to cope with the stringent requirements of real-time applications. This paper presents a new end-point centric handover approach based on the ant colony probabilistic equation that utilizes the received signal strength and the mean opinion score to trigger the handover. Some simulations were conducted using OMNeT++ to measure the effectiveness of the proposed approach comparing with an existing method, the Endpoint Centric Handover (ECHO). The results show that the proposed approach has better performance compared to the ECHO.