A resource management strategy for interconnected WLAN and UMTS networks based on user mobility, call renegotiation, and call reallocation

The users of telecommunications services are demanding access to their subscribed services in mobile contexts. This demand leads to the development of mechanisms that enable the transference of service sessions between networks, seamlessly to the user. These mechanisms allow the operator to jointly manage its networks resources, providing a better service to its customers and, simultaneously, increasing its revenue. Starting from the UMTS and WLAN interconnection architecture defined by 3GPP, this paper presents a new strategy for joint radio resource management, suitable for contexts where these networks are interconnected. This strategy bases its decisions on criteria related to user mobility characteristics. The algorithm also introduces the possibility of renegotiating new calls and reallocating running calls from one access network to another. The new radio resource management strategy is compared with two well-known strategies, the former based on coverage area and the later based on load balancing. The comparison studies show the proposed strategy outperforms the other strategies in what concerns call blocking probability and applications QoS support. Besides, the proposed strategy tends to reduce the handoffs between networks.