Reward-Based Radio Interface Selection for Hybrid 4G UMTS and LTE Communications

To provide gigabit data rate for the forwarding link under high-mobility wireless communications, 3GPP specifies LTE/LTE-Advanced specifications as the 4G system that cooperate with the existing UMTS system. To balance loads among different communication interfaces in the hybrid cellular system is one of the most important issues that should be addressed for achieving efficient radio resource allocations. In a shared packet service, the 3GPP UMTS adopts the VSF-OFCDM interface to allocate orthogonal codes of an OVSF code tree in two-dimension (2D) spreading of the time and frequency domains. Nevertheless, UMTS suffers from high packet loss rate and high bandwidth waste rate. In 4G, although the LTE/LTE-Advanced interface offers a high data rate, it suffers from unbalanced loads and moderate reward. This paper thus proposes an adaptive radio interface selection for balancing loads between the UMTS and LTE/LTE-Advanced interfaces according to various interference and mobility environments. Numerical results indicate that the proposed approach outperforms other approaches in fairness, FRL and utilization.