Authors: Virgilios Passas, Nikos Makris, Vasileios Miliotis, Thanasis Korakis and Leandros Tassiulas

Conference:  IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kansas City, MO, USA, 20-24 May 2018

Abstract: Ultra-Dense Heterogeneous Network deployments are expected to boost the offered network capacity and enhance the user-perceived Quality of Experience, through the simultaneous offering of multiple technologies using distinct or shared wireless spectrum. In such environments with a plethora of available Radio Access Technologies (RATs), the network UEs shall decide either independently or assisted through operator based services on which network they shall use to better serve their needs. In this work, we model the network selection problem in a Multi-RAT system, based on the Paris Metro Pricing (PMP) scheme, enhanced with dynamic pricing formed by the congestion of each available technology. We assume that the network UEs are equipped with multi-homing features and thus are able to use concurrently more than one technologies, based on the requirements of the applications requesting network connectivity (e.g. UHD video streaming). We port and experimentally evaluate the proposed system model over a testbed setup, using distributed components running at the UEs and at a Core Network controller. We provide evaluation results on the average cost per UE for the selected RATs, the average data rate distribution of each UE per RAT and how these performance metrics are affected under different client ordering policies at the network controller.

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