Utility-function-based radio-access-technology selection for heterogeneous wireless networks

Radio-access-technology (RAT) selection plays an important role in providing users with Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees and improving the utilization efficiency of radio resources over heterogeneous wireless networks, which is one of effective ways to implement Internet of Things (IoT) in future. In heterogeneous environments containing multiple networks with different RATs, diverse factors characterizing users' preferences and QoS features need to be considered for RAT selection. To address this issue, this paper proposes a network selection scheme based on a utility function. The proposed scheme and the utility function jointly take users' QoS demands, preferences, channel state information (CSI), costs as well as network loads into account, such that the radio resource can be efficiently used in supporting diverse services. Simulations results are provided to evaluate the performances of our proposed scheme compared with the existing baseline scheme. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.