Service suitability based RAT selection for beyond 3G systems

Abstract

In beyond 3G systems, one of the important factors is to address radio access technology (RAT) selection and load balancing between heterogeneous networks to ensure high spectral efficiency in an era where spectral resources are at a premium. This work aims to address the feasibility of utilizing WiFi as complementary service for HSDPA, to prevent quality of service deterioration in the event of network overload in HSDPA during the busy period. The proposed RAT selection algorithm is based on the load of each system, and the results show that the outage probability can be improved by up to 45% relative to a stand-alone HSDPA system.