Cooperation Control Between Wireless and Base Stations in Wireless Access Network Consisting of Wireless Networks with Different Coverages

Mobile terminal users prefer WLAN (Wireless LAN) to cellular network because of no connection fee. WLANs are available in some places where many people gather in urban areas, whereas public access network like WLAN should be deployed at a low cost for rural leisure venues and momentary events. In this paper, we propose a wireless access network with larger coverage than WLAN by the cooperation between WLAN and another wireless network with larger coverage. This achieves the wider deployment of such wireless access networks with a smaller number (cost) of base stations. Connection control that decides which wireless network should be used for each wireless station is also proposed to increase the effective network capacity of the wireless access network. Performance evaluations show that the proposal achieves larger effective network capacity compared with greedy connection that all the wireless stations inside the WLAN coverage use the WLAN and the other ones do the other network with larger coverage, respectively.