RAT-NHP: Radio Access Technology Selection Based on N-hop Prediction

Abstract

Radio access technology (RAT) is used to choose the best target network during the network access or network handover. It could be used for the rescuing scenario in the wireless multi-hop networks. Most researches about RAT selection focus on heterogeneous cell networks, which are single-hop networks. The radio access selection method for cell networks is no longer suitable for heterogeneous wireless multi-hop network (HWMN), because the communicating quality of the expected access point (EAP) could not reflect the whole network capability due to the multi-hop characteristics. This paper presents a novel metric, named n-hop prediction (NHP), for radio access selection in HWMN. NHP takes network capability and load within n-hop range of the expected access point into account, and also it takes users' QoS requirement into account. Simulation results reveal that the proposed approach can achieve better performance than that without considering these factors.