Radio Access Network Selection in a Heterogeneous Communication Environment

In recent years, a variety of wireless network technologies have been developed and deployed, including UMTS, WiFi, and WiMAX. The overlapping of different networks creates heterogeneous wireless environments, which can enable seamless communications, joint resource management and adaptive quality of service. In such environments, operators do not need to reject user requests, but redirect them to the most appropriate networks. However, heterogeneous wireless systems still have many pending issues to solve. One of them is the selection of the most appropriate radio access network when receiving a service request. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an adaptive and efficient algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed radio access network selection algorithm can improve the network performance and capacity.