Simulative performance comparison of network selection algorithms in the framework of the 802.21 standard

The diffusion of mobile devices, equipped by many different network interfaces, offers great benefits to mobile communications, in particular in the field of the so called Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). At the same time, the development of the IEEE 802.21 standard, that facilitates the interoperability between different access networks, assures further performance improvements. In this scenario, the network selection, that consists in determining the best Radio Access Network (RAN) among a set of available heterogeneous links, plays a fundamental role. The main contribution of this paper is a performance comparison among different network selection algorithms, within the framework proposed by the 802.21 standard. This performance comparison is obtained through a simulator developed by using Network Simulator 2 (ns-2).