Real-Life Performance Analysis of Always-Best-Connected Network

Mobile Internet has rapidly evolved in the past years with an ever increasing number of novel technologies and services with a variety of access technologies. Indeed, today's mobile devices often support multiple communication technologies for accessing Internet services. However, they all do not tap the full potential of these capabilities, as users often have to manually select each network, and only one network is used at a time. The concept of Always Best Connected (ABC) allows a person to connect applications using the devices and access technologies that best suit to his or her needs, thereby combining the features of access technologies to provide an enhanced user experience for future Internet. This Always Best Connected scenario has been considered to be complex and to generate a number of requirements, not only for the technical solutions, but also in terms of business relationships between operators and service providers. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standardized the Evolved Packet System (EPS), where one of the key features is a support access system selection based on a combination of operator policies, user preference and access network conditions. The standard focuses mainly on the operator point of view, and the user is expected to follow this approach. Nevertheless, the standard offers a number of possibilities where the user-centric approach can improve the ABC network selection over the selection predefined by the operator. This research shows how to design a simple but efficient algorithm for the network selection when implementing an Always Best Connected application for mobile devices. This application works with the EPS standard. A real-life implementation and proof-of-concept performance measurements are presented. This will show that in real-life the simple and straightforward methods can provide efficient solutions for problems known to be complex.