Two vertical handcover metrics toward an IEEE 802.11N network

This paper deals with two metrics for vertical handover toward an IEEE 802.11n network, estimated from the physical layer instead of the MAC layer. For this reason we don’t need to be connected to the network to estimate them. The first metric is related to the channel occupancy rate, and is estimated by the mean of a likelihood function of the observed samples. The second one is related to the collision rate. Using an information theoretic criterion and taking advantage of the OFDMstructure of the signal, we avoid the channel length estimation and decide if a collision occured or not.