WLAN-first access scheme with service rate differentiation in WLAN and cellular interworking

In cellular/WLAN interworking, WLAN is usually deployed to offload the heavy traffic in hot spots. To improve the offloading efficiency, we proposed a new WLAN-first scheme with service rate differentiation and analyzed its performance. The analytical results are validated by computer simulation. It is observed that, under the premise of QoS guarantee, the proposed scheme can significantly improve the throughput compared with the existing WLAN-first scheme. And the proposed scheme is easy to implement as the AP could decide the admission of a TIE based on its RSS (received signal strength) and the admission region, which could be computed off-line according to the analysis in this paper. The proposed scheme could be used for the future cellular/WLAN integration and may provide some insights for future extension.