Vertical Handover in Heterogeneous Networks: A Comparative Experimental and Simulation‐Based Investigation

The continuously growing traffic generated by Mobile Terminals (MTs)—such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, and other mobile Internet devices—is nowadays one of the biggest challenges for mobile network operators, especially because this process is not supposed to vanish, at least from a short-time perspective. Therefore, in order to prevent network saturation phenomena, the operators are forced to increase their network capacity more quickly than the customers’ demand increase. This goal would be probably achieved by a combination of methods: (i) increasing the available bandwidth in cooperation with public communications agency, e.g., by exploiting the spectrum holes; (ii) increasing the cell spectral efficiency through technology upgrades, e.g., by switching from 3G to the upcoming Long Term Evolution (LTE) [1] or WiMAX [2] technologies; (iii) reducing the

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