Intelligent Network Management and Control

4Multicriteria Optimization Methods for Network Selection in a Heterogeneous Environment

Fayssal BENDAOUD

ESI-SBA, Sidi Bel Abbès, Algeria

4.1. Introduction

As a consequence of its boom during the last decade, the telecommunications sector plays an important and essential role in our present-day societies. The most significant innovation in this field is undoubtedly “wireless” technology. The connection possibility offered by Hertzian waves gave rise to several types of wireless networks. These networks compete for user attention, offering higher performances, especially in terms of quality of service (QoS). From the perspective of TCP/IP model, the IP and link layers are the most important. Consequently, IP must cover the key functionalities associated with wireless networks, particularly the management of handover and of GPS localization and mobility. Moreover, due to the broad range of choices of radio access technologies proposed by many providers of cellular/wireless networks, and considering the QoS requirements of modern applications, choosing a network type proves to be a complicated task. A single and unified approach to network choice is therefore required, and this is referred to as network selection in a heterogeneous environment. A heterogeneous wireless environment is a set of wireless equipment using various radio access technologies. In a heterogeneous environment, the user is not connected to a single network, but he/she can rather benefit from all the networks ...