Network selection in heterogeneous wireless environments

Abstract

The evolution of wireless access networks has led to the vision of an integrated heterogeneous wireless environment consisting of various Radio Access Technologies (RATs). In such an environment, users with multimode terminals can seamlessly change from one RAT to another RAT attempting to maximize their satisfaction level, while providers may carefully utilize without overloading their subsystems. In this paper, we focus on the Network Selection problem to allocate terminals to most appropriate RATs by jointly examining both users and providers' preferences. We introduce a utility-based optimization function and formulate the terminal assignment problem as an optimization problem which is recognized as NP-hard. We propose a Greedy heuristic which exploits a metric that measures the utility gained versus the capacity resource spent for each allocation and confirm its superior performance against three Bin-Packing heuristics.