Point of attachment selection in heterogeneous radio access technology environments

Load balancing through cell-site selection in wireless networks has gained much attention as an efficient way to utilize scarce wireless resources. This paper considers a Point of Attachment (PoA) selection problem which is an extension of the cell-site selection problem. The PoA selection problem deals with an extended environment where each user device is with a different radio access technology (RAT) capability including multiple wireless network interface cards (WNICs). The goal of this paper is to formulate the problem that aims to maximize the network-wide utility under the environment of multi RATs and heterogeneous user device capabilities. To solve this problem, we first prove the problem is NP-Hard and propose a heuristic algorithm. Through extensive simulations, we evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm against two received signal strength based approaches.