Chapter 3 - Network selection in a heterogeneous wireless environment based on path prediction and user mobility

Abstract

The telecommunications sector has grown in importance in our modern society as a result of its explosive growth over the previous decade. In the meantime, mobile users have multimode terminals that allow them to connect to several radio access technologies such as WLAN, H and H+, and LTE (long-term evolution), resulting in a heterogeneous wireless environment. The coexistence of several radio access technologies (RATs) in the same region is a core characteristic of a heterogeneous environment, which allows users to connect to the optimal RAT at each point of the call session to meet their needs; this latter relates to the network selection mechanism. As a result, the challenge entails determining the most prudent RAT from the available radio access technologies. This activity is called network selection, and it is based on a number of factors such as quality of service (QoS), user mobility, cost of using such RATs, energy consumption, and so on. Authors in the literature have offered several tactics and methodologies with the goal of providing the optimum QoS to users. Our goal is to provide a novel framework for dealing with the network selection problem that produces better results than earlier works. The approach takes user mobility into account as a crucial criterion, and the results are quite promising.