Cross-layer radio resource management in integrated WWAN and WLAN networks

Abstract

This paper proposes a mobility adaptive network selection scheme in the context of wireless wide area network (WWAN) and wireless local area network (WLAN) radio access technologies (RATs) that supports both real-time (RT) and non-real-time (NRT) service classes. Physical layer information based call admission control (CAC) is considered for the two RATs to enforce service specific QoS requirements. The effectiveness of the cross-protocol-layer information for radio resource management (RRM) in integrated WWAN and WLAN networks is assessed analytically for individual service classes in a multi-service environment using the theory of Markov chains. The impact of non-uniform user and mobility distributions due to the existence of hotspot in the macro-cell area and the effect of network selection parameter measurement errors on the RRM performance are also evaluated. Numerical results show that the proposed network selection scheme minimizes the rate of unnecessary vertical handoffs, thereby providing stable communication without degrading the call blocking probability and call outage probability performance metrics.