Soft-Prioritization Based System Selection Strategy for Software Defined Radio in Heterogeneous Networks

In the next-generation wireless networks, system convergence progressed towards the realization of seamless and ubiquitous environment with software defined radio (SDR). This manuscript proposes a soft-prioritization based system selection algorithm performed by SDR terminal and investigates the effectiveness of the soft-prioritization based system selection by using a concrete simulation model in the practical channel model. To maximize the quality of service (QoS), wireless communication systems are prioritized on the basis of criteria for system selection such as data rate, channel quality and cost, and those systems should be dynamically changed. However, frequent inter-system handovers based on hard-prioritization are undesirable in view of interrupting and dropping communication, particularly for real-time traffics. Wireless communication systems are softly prioritized in the soft-prioritization based system selection algorithm, and therefore inter-system handovers between systems with the same priority aren't initiated. To elucidate the validity of the soft-prioritization based system selection algorithm, a system simulation model consisting of five wireless communication systems is employed. Simulation results confirm that the soft-prioritization system selection algorithm offers higher performance in terms of the number of inter-system handovers and average throughput of best effort traffic