Intelligent call setup strategy for multimedia communication in heterogeneous wireless network

Mobile communication has become the major choice of personal communication today. With the rapid proliferation of wireless network technologies, mobile users can communicate through more and more different wireless networks. In such a heterogeneous wireless network environment, traditional wisdom is to ensure mobile users always best connected (ABC) to one of their nearby available networks. However, the ABC strategy may be sub-optimal as the cost and quality of multimedia communication depends not only on the access network of the caller (source) but also on that of the callee (destination). Thus, intelligently selecting a best network connection, or a source and destination access network pair, for users is necessary in next generation multimedia communication, in which various media types, such as voice, video and data, are related and jointly contribute to the communication quality and cost. This paper utilized Analytic Network Process (ANP) to model the problem of call setup strategy for multimedia communication. ANP is powerful in representing complex networked decision process. In the paper, we illustrated, by an example, how ANP sets up calls that fulfill the requirement of users.