In order to cater for the overwhelming growth in bandwidth demand from mobile Internet users operators have started to deploy different, overlapping radio access network technologies. One important challenge in such a heterogeneous wireless environment is to enable network selection mechanisms in order to keep the mobile users Always Best Connected (ABC) anywhere and anytime. Game theory techniques have been receiving growing attention in recent years as they can be adopted in order to model and understand competitive and cooperative scenarios between rational decision makers. This paper presents an overview of the network selection decision problem and challenges, a comprehensive classification of related game theoretic approaches and a discussion on the application of game theory to the network selection problem faced by the next generation of 4G wireless networks.
Development in wireless access technologies and multihomed personal user devices is driving the way towards a heterogeneous wireless access network environment. Success in this arena will be reliant on the ability to offer an enhanced user experience. Users will plan to take advantage of the competition and always connect to the network which can best service their preferences for the current application. They will rely on intelligent network selection decision strategies to aid them in their choice. The contribution of this paper is to propose an intelligent utility-based strategy for network selection in this multi-access network scenario. A number of utility functions are examined which explore different user attitudes to risk for money and delay preferences related to their current application. For example we show that risk takers who are willing to pay more money get a better service.
Abstract-Energy conservation has become a critical issue around the world. In smart phones, battery power capabilities are not keeping up with the advances in other technologies (e.g., processing and memory) and are rapidly becoming a concern, especially in view of the growth in usage of energy-hungry mobile multimedia streaming. The deficiency in battery power and the need for reduced energy consumption provides motivation for researchers to develop energy efficient techniques in order to manage the power consumption in next-generation wireless networks. As there is little analysis in the literature on the relationship between the wireless environment and the mobile device energy consumption, this paper investigates the impact of network-related factors (e.g., network load and signal quality level) on the power consumption of the mobile device in the context of video delivery. This paper analyzes the energy consumption of an Android device and the efficiency of the system in several scenarios while performing video delivery (over UDP or TCP) on an IEEE 802.11g network. The results show that the network load and the signal quality level have a combined significant impact on the energy consumption. This analysis can be further used when proposing energy efficient adaptive multimedia and handover mechanisms.
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