Economic access network selection in heterogeneous wireless networks environment

Today's wireless networks are composed of multiple radio technologies and allow users to choose the convenient radio technologies at certain locations. The operators, for their part, hope to maximize their revenue with efficient usage of their networks. To achieve these benefits from the heterogeneous wireless networks, the access network selection has to be optimized. In this paper we propose an access network selection based on Markov Decision Process and related shadow prices. The approach integrates both the user and operator objectives by using operator and user utilities. The proposed access network selection algorithm is tested in a WIFI-LTE heterogeneous wireless network scenario using OMNeT++ simulator. The results show that the proposed approach provides significantly larger operator revenue and notable increased user throughput when compared to commonly used access networks selection based on the received signal strength.