A service-based access selection algorithm for always best connected networks

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

It is expected that future wireless systems will consist of several distinct radio access technologies, such as WCDMA/HSDPA, GSM/EDGE/GPRS, WLAN and others, forming a mobile multi-access system offering advanced multimedia services. Together with the evermore availability of user terminals capable of operating with more than one communication technology, users can take advantage of such systems by accessing services using the technology that most suits them. Unfortunately, more options can also bring more complexity if too much manual configuration is needed, which in turn could degrade the user experience. It would be suitable if the selection of the network was as automatic as possible so that the user could concentrate on the services while the network could take care of the access selection. The Always Best Connected (ABC) Network concept defines that devices should always be online, connected through the available communication technologies that can satisfy the service and user requirements while also respecting requirements from the network providers. The realization of the concept implies that the collection of available networks should now be seen as a single network with heterogenous characteristics that can be explored according to the demands of many different service classes. This can be achieved by use of a Common Radio Resource Management (CRRM) component that is aware of the status of the networks and can decide what is the most suitable action to be taken. Currently, there are very limited automatic selection solutions which are applied to existing networks, mainly because decisions can become too complex as the number of supported services and available network technologies increases. Because of this, the level of flexibility in these systems is very small, being very specific for a small set of service classes or supported networks. Another limitation is that the algorithms are typically offline, meaning that some knowledge about the traffic must be previously assumed, resulting in non-optimal solutions. A more capable online selection algorithm that can perform optimally regardless of the amount of supported service classes and networks is yet to be seen. This dissertation presents an heuristic for online access selection in ABC networks that has a near-optimal performance regardless of the number of supported access technologies and with respect to resource utilization, service attendancy and rejection rates, while also providing some level of fairness between the supported service classes. The algorithm, called LessDamage is designed as a binpacking heuristic, where the objects to be packed are the applications and the bins are the network technologies. The performance analysis shows that the proposed solution outperforms the the classic online bin-packing algorithms and measures very well against the best offline strategy. A possible direction to follow in order to make the algorithm perform well with the number of service classes is also presented

ASSUNTO(S)

ciencia da computacao abc networks access selection binpacking

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