  One of the most challenges of 4G network is to have a unified network of
heterogeneous wireless networks. To achieve seamless mobility in such a diverse
environment, vertical hand off is still a challenging problem. In many
situations handover failures and unnecessary handoffs are triggered causing
degradation of services, reduction in throughput and increase the blocking
probability and packet loss. In this paper a new vertical handoff decision
algorithm handover necessity estimation (HNE), is proposed to minimize the
number of handover failure and unnecessary handover in heterogeneous wireless
networks. we have proposed a multi criteria vertical handoff decision algorithm
based on two parts: traveling time estimation and time threshold calculation.
Our proposed methods are compared against two other methods: (a) the fixed RSS
threshold based method, in which handovers between the cellular network and the
WLAN are initiated when the RSS from the WLAN reaches a fixed threshold, and
(b) the hysteresis based method, in which a hysteresis is introduced to prevent
the ping-pong effect. Simulation results show that, this method reduced the
number of handover failures and unnecessary handovers up to 80% and 70%,
respectively.
