Abstract -The interworking between the third-generation (3G) cellular network and wireless local area networks (WLANs) is one of the promising approaches to next-generation wireless networks, which can exploit the complementary advantages of the cellular network and the WLAN. Resource management for the cellular/WLAN integrated network is an important open issue that deserves more research efforts. In this article, we present a policy framework for resource management in a loosely-coupled cellular/WLAN integrated network, where load balancing policies are designed to efficiently utilize the pooled resources of the network. A two-phase control strategy is adopted in the load balancing policies, in which call assignment is used to provision statistic quality of service (QoS) guarantee during the admission phase, and dynamic vertical handoff during the traffic serving phase is used to smooth the performance variance. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate that the proposed load balancing solution achieves significant performance improvement over two other reference schemes. Index Terms -Loosely-coupled cellular/WLAN interworking, call admission control, load balancing, policy-based resource management, vertical handoff. Motivated by the ever-increasing demand for wireless communications, the cellular network has evolved to the third generation (3G), e.g., the universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) specified by the third generation partner project (3GPP), which is one of the most popular 3G systems nowadays. The 3G cellular network is capable of supporting quality of service (QoS), critical to multimedia services but at the expense of high complexity and implementation cost. For example,
A policy based resource management framework is presented in REF for Cellular-WLAN integrated network, which improves the network utilization by dynamically balancing the offered traffic load via call admission control (CAC) and vertical handoff (VHO).
Load Balancing for Cellular / WLAN Integrated Networks
ICCCN
Computer Science