Network Selection for Multicast Groups in Heterogeneous Wireless Environments

Coexistence of various wireless access networks and the ability of mobile terminals to switch between them make an optimal selection of serving networks for multicast groups a challenging problem. Since optimal network selection requires large dimensions of data to be collected from several network locations and sent between several network components, the scalability can easily become a bottleneck in large-scale systems. Therefore, reducing data exchange within heterogeneous wireless networks is important. We study the decision-making process and the data that needs to be sent between different network components. We present two decentralized solutions to this problem that operate with reduced sets of information. We define the upper and lower bounds to these solutions and evaluate them in the OMNet++ simulation environment. Both solutions provide a substantial improvement in performance compared to the lower bound.