Kinda Khawam, Marc Ibrahim, Johanne Cohen, Samer Lahoud, and Samir Tohme (2011)
Individual vs. Global Radio Resource Management in a Hybrid Broadband Network
In: ICC 2011 Wireless Networking Symposium (ICC'11 WNS), kyoto, Japan.
Nowadays, with the abundance of diverse air interfaces in
the same operating area, advanced Radio Resource Management
(RRM) is vital to take advantage of the available system
resources. In such a scenario, a mobile user will be able
to connect concurrently to different wireless access
networks. In this paper, we consider the downlink of a
hybrid network with two broadband Radio Access Technologies
(RAT): WiMAX and WiFi. Two approaches are proposed to load
balance the traffic of every user between the two available
RATs: an individual approach where mobile users selfishly
strive to improve their performance and a global approach
where resource allocation is made in a way to satisfy all
mobile users. We devise for the individual approach a fully
distributed resource management scheme portrayed as a
non-cooperative game. We characterize the Nash equilibriums
of the proposed RRM game and put forward a decentralized
algorithm based on replicator dynamics to achieve those
equilibriums. In the global approach, resources are
assigned by the system in order to enhance global
performances. For the two approaches, we show that after
convergence, each user is connected to a single RAT which
avoids costly traffic splitting between available RATs.