Decentralized Radio Resource Allocation for Single-Network and Multi-Homing Services in Cooperative Heterogeneous Wireless Access Medium

Abstract

This paper studies radio resource allocation for mobile terminals (MTs) in a heterogeneous wireless access medium. Unlike the existing solutions in literature, we consider the simultaneous presence of both single-network and multi-homing services in the networking environment. In single-network services, an MT is assigned to the best wireless access network available at its location. On the other hand, in multi-homing services, an MT utilizes all available wireless access networks simultaneously. The objective of the radio resource allocation is of twofold: to determine the optimal assignment of MTs with single-network service to the available wireless access networks, and to find the corresponding optimal bandwidth allocation to the MTs with single-network and multi-homing services. We develop a sub-optimal decentralized implementation of the radio resource allocation, which relies on network cooperation to perform the allocation in a dynamic environment in an efficient manner. The MT plays an active role in the resource allocation operation, whether by selecting the best available wireless network for single-network services or by determining the required bandwidth share from each available network for multi-homing services. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm.