Optimising Radio Access in a Heterogeneous Wireless Network Environment

A variety of wireless network technologies have been developed and deployed, including GSM, UMTS, WiFi and WiMAX. The advantages of having an integrated heterogeneous wireless network environment include seamless communications, joint resource management and adaptive quality of service. In such environment, operators would not need to reject the service requests, but redirect them to appropriate networks. However, the sought aims of a heterogeneous network system still have many pending issues. One of them is the selection of the most appropriate radio access network (RAN) according to the requested service and the context information about the user and the networks. We aim to develop efficient RAN selection algorithms to facilitate radio access optimisation for future heterogeneous network system. The simulation results show that our RAN selection algorithm can improve the network performance.