Intelligent Network Selection Mechanism in Macro-Femto HetNets Considering Network Connectivity and Users' Preference

Offloading traffic from macrocell to femtocell network is a promising way to cope with the fast-growing mobile data traffic at macrocells. Femtocells have been densely deployed in urban areas. In this paper, we propose an intelligent network selection mechanism to assist users' decision making when simultaneously confronting with macrocell and femtocell network. We consider a two-tier macro-femto heterogenous networks (HetNets): femtocell network provides higher data rate but charges higher price; on the other hand, macrocell network may offer unsatisfied data rate but charges lower price. Our network selection problem is modeled in two different ways: (i) payment minimization subject to a delay tolerance constraint; and (ii) throughput maximization subject to a budget constraint. We present an Integer Linear Program (ILP) solution. An efficient heuristic for provisioning complementary supervisory paths and cycles is also introduced and the solution quality is compared with ILP for different sets of random user light paths and different parameters.