A design of smart radio research platform for universal access in a multi-RAT environment

Considering multiple radio access technologies (RATs) environment for the future wireless access networks, effective RAT discovery and selection are important tasks. They enable discovery of various RATs and let the user select appropriate RAT considering users´ preferences and other parameters. The wireless network operator may also take advantage of RAT selection in order to distribute loads among two or more RATs. This paper introduces our pilot design of smart radio research platform (SRRP), on which performance of RAT discovery and selection algorithms are tested. Designing SRRP, we stressed on compliance with existing technical standard specifications, e.g. IEEE P1900.4 and 802.21, efficient RAT discovery, and reasonable RAT selection performance. In regard to RAT discovery algorithm we focused on short discovery time in order to reduce battery consumption and minimize possible quality of service (QoS) degradation. Objective of RAT selection is two folded; one is to choose a satisfactory radio connection and the other one is to maintain the connection reliably. Besides RAT discovery and selection algorithms we incorporated spectrum aggregation capability into SRRP to support user´s QoS requirement by allocating an extra spectrum block to a base station (BS) where the existing spectrum block is congested.