Enhancing base station connectivity with directional information of movement

High-performance smartphones with various sensor capabilities, including the inertial measurement unit, allow us to have higher freedom to localize our movements and utilize them for other applications. In this paper, we present a simple method to estimate the heading of a user using only a digital compass, accelerometer, and gyroscope. Several experiments were conducted using an Apple iPhone. In addition, we also present an algorithm to reduce the number of handover attempts in a dense base station environment. A series of simulations were conducted on OPNET in various emulated environments to present the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation results show that our proposed algorithm effectively reduces the ping-pong effect in a dense base station environment.