Optimising access in an integrated wireless network environment

Some of the important advantages of having an integrated mobile network environment would be seamless communications, joint resource management and adaptive quality of service. In such environment, operators would not need to reject the user requests, but redirect them to appropriate networks. However, the sought aims of an integrated 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 inside a realistic internetworking system architecture. Also, as part of our research, we developed models for UMTS and WiFi networks which facilitate the evaluation of the network resource availability in these networks, which provide a more realistic input of network context information into RAN selection algorithms. The simulation results show that our RAN selection algorithms can improve the network performance.