Adaptive and efficient radio access selection and optimisation in a heterogeneous communication environment

In recent years, a variety of wireless network technologies have been developed and deployed. Future mobile communication system will have a packet switched core. The access to the mobile communication system will not be restricted to the mobile cellular networks but may be via other wireless or even wired technologies. Such hybrid access can enable service convergence, joint resource management and adaptive quality of service. The future mobile communication system still has many pending issues to solve. One of them is the selection of the most appropriate radio access network when receiving a service request. This paper addresses this issue by proposing a new adaptive and efficient algorithm. This algorithm facilitates radio access network selection and optimisation considering application requirements, user satisfaction, gains, as well as network resource availability and utilisation. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can improve the network performance and capacity.