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Growing demands for pervasive and ubiquitous services over wireless mobile networks and evolution of such networks towards heterogeneous solutions have emphasized the necessity of more intelligent handoff decisions. The existing handoff management methods in the literature are mostly using signal strength measurements and other link quality evaluations not addressing the knowledge about context of mobile devices, users and networks. Recently, context-aware handoff management has been considered as a novel candidate for fourth generation (4G) wireless technology. In this paper, user perceived quality of service has been considered in addition to traditional contexts such as user preferences, application requirements, network parameters and link quality for decision making. User perceived quality (UPQ) has been employed as a trigger source, in addition to link layer triggers which are emerged using media independent handover (MIH) event service. This paper presents a policy based mechanism for handoff decision making where fuzzy petri nets (FPNs) have been utilized as its evaluation algorithm. A case study has been provided by simulations to show the usability and user level satisfaction. Simulation results show superior performance in terms of UPQ, jitter and packet delivery measures. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.