A Rule Based Co-operative Approach for Cell Selection in High Speed Cellular Networks

In this era of perpetual connectivity, with the introduction of new data-intensive real-time applications such as video-conferencing, video-on-demand, and interactive gaming, the need for doing more with limited network resources has become more than ever before. The continuous drive toward the notion of pervasive computing and communication requires a shift toward more adaptive and collaborative network resource control. In this paper, a rule based collaborative approach is applied using a Rete based rule engine to manage radio resources in high speed cellular networks. In particular, the cell selection problem in high speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) is addressed. As a prerequisite to this work, an extensive HSDPA module in Opnet simulator was developed along with several packet scheduling algorithms. In order to ensure the best user experience, our approach allows the network and the mobile device to cooperatively choose the best serving cell for an incoming user. This approach incorporates many factors in the decision making such as QoS requirements, device capability, available network resources, and channel condition. Our results show that this cooperative approach outperforms the traditional channel condition based approach by as much as 85%.