Cell selection and trigger point decision for next generation heterogeneous wireless networking environment: Algorithm & evaluation

It is expected that many heterogeneous wireless networking systems such as 3GPP Long-term Evolution (LTE) system, WiMAX/WiBro system and WLAN system will exist in the next generation wireless communication environment. Under such environment, various communication services will be introduced by integrating heterogeneous wireless networking technologies, especially at radio access networks. In order to provide such integrated communication services, integrated radio resource management and seamless vertical handover across such heterogeneous access networks should be supported. In this paper, to tackle these problems, we propose a Generic Link Layer (GLL) based Common Radio Resource Management (CRRM) architecture and three vertical handover decision algorithms. We propose a vertical handover decision (VHD) algorithm that is a combination of a policy and a multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) approaches designed for achieving effective and seamless handover between heterogeneous radio access networks, especially between the LTE and the WLAN systems. We also propose the Data Mining(C4.5) based VHO decision making algorithm not only to consider various VHO decision factors but also to decide the handover trigger point adaptively to the network traffic situation. In order to verify effectiveness of the proposed CRRM architecture and the three proposed VHO decision making algorithms, extensive simulation studies are performed under various traffic situations. Simulation study shows that the proposed two VHO algorithms outperform the conventional received signal strength (RSS) based VHO algorithm in terms of the data throughput, the handover success rate, and the system service cost.