Abstract: Vertical handover is the evolving concept in 4G for seamless communication between heterogeneous networks. In this paper, our main objective is to analyze handover between two WLAN, two Wimax, two UMTS networks. The vertical handover decision is taken based on the variance based algorithm, which calculates the variance of parameters such as delay, jitter, bandwidth and packet loss for various above mentioned networks and the network with most of the parameters with minimum variance is selected. This algorithm is also compared with with other algorithms such as MEW (Multiplicative experiment weighting), SAW (Simple Additive Weighting), TOPOSIS (Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution) and GRA (Grey Relational Analysis). These algorithms are appropriate for different traffic classes. Simulation results for proposed variance based algorithm in Matlab is discussed and compared with other Multiple attribute decision making algorithm basis of bandwidth; jitter, delay etc. are discussed in the paper. It can be seen that the proposed variance algorithm gives less packet delay than all the algorithms, Jitter is also is least than all the other algorithms.

Keywords: SAW, TOPOSIS, GRA, MEW.