Mohamad Yassin, Samer Lahoud, and Marc Ibrahim (2013)
A Hybrid Approach for RAT Selection in Wireless Heterogeneous Networks
In: The 3rd International Conference on Communications and Information Technology (ICCIT-2013): Wireless Communications and Signal Processing (ICCIT-2013 WCSP), Beirut, Lebanon.
Given the diversity and heterogeneity of the existing
wireless radio access technologies, a key problem that
arises in this context is the radio access network
selection. The purpose of radio access network selection is
to improve the quality of service experienced by clients
and optimize the use of available radio resources. In this
context, two approaches can be adopted: either a
centralized or a distributed approach. In this paper, based
on the two existing radio network selection approaches, we
propose a new hybrid approach that combines the distributed
one with periodic centralized interventions. We introduce
the concept of the proposed hybrid approach, and study its
performance. In the hybrid approach, client inbound
sessions perform a distributed network selection while the
system regularly intervenes to change client associations
and/or to modulate the distributed algorithm in order to
guarantee an acceptable level of performance. The results
show that the hybrid approach performance is close to that
of the optimal solution, and is better than that of the
distributed approach in specific scenarios. Moreover, the
hybrid approach reduces the overall signaling load for the
system by decreasing the number of required handovers.