Radio Access Technology Selection enabled by IEEE P1900.4

This paper addresses the implementation of decentralized RAT selection strategies at the mobile terminal in a heterogeneous wireless network scenario. This can be achieved if the network provides some information or guidelines to assist the terminal in its decisions, making use of the IEEE P1900.4 protocol. In order to illustrate the procedure, a specific RAT selection strategy for heterogeneous CDMA/TDMA networks devoted to reduce interference by allocating users according to the measured path loss is analyzed. Results show that the proposed decentralized strategy is able to outperform a reference centralized load-balancing strategy.