An adaptive quality-of-service network selection mechanism for heterogeneous mobile networks

The success of broadband service has attracted more people to surf internet with the demand of high mobility and high bandwidth. The ongoing wireless local area network (WLAN) standardization and development activities allow WLAN to provide high data rate in unlicensed spectrum. It motivates cellular network operators to adopt WLAN as a complement to cellular 3G systems in hot spot areas. Consequently, it is imperative to develop a network selection technique to assure quality-of-service (QoS) for the integrated cellular/WLAN system. In this paper, an optimization scheme for mobile users to select a network in an integrated WLAN and universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) system is proposed. In order to provide users a prospect of being always best connected, analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and grey relational analysis (GRA) techniques are integrated to make decision. The former defines selection criteria and the latter evaluates network alternatives. The network selection module is built at the link layer, and collects the time-varying QoS information through cross-layer message signaling. Simulations conducted in a heterogeneous system with UMTS and WLAN show that the proposed network selection technique can successfully satisfy QoS requirements for a variety of applications through a fair decision on the optimum network for mobile users at any time. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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