Access Network Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Abstract

Future heterogeneous wireless network (HWN) will integrate several radio access technologies (RATs) and domains into one common network. To get benefit from the individual characteristics of each RAT and to exploit the gain resulting from jointly considering the whole set of available radio resources in each RAT, a new set of radio resource management (RRM) mechanisms have to be considered. These new RRM mechanisms have to support mobile users who can access more than one RAT alternatively or simultaneously using multi-mode terminal. An important RRM consideration for overall HWN stability, resource utilization, user satisfaction, and Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning is the selection of the most optimal and promising access network (AN). This paper proposes a general framework to solve the access network selection (ANS) problem in the heterogeneous wireless environments. The proposed framework has been used to present and design several multi criteria ANS algorithms that consider the user, the operator, and the QoS view points. A combination of fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms AI tools have been used to give the proposed framework the required scalability, flexibility, and simplicity. The simulation results show that the proposed framework and algorithms have better and more robust performance over the random selection algorithm that is used as a reference algorithm.