Flow/Interface Association for Multihomed Mobile Terminals in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Wireless access networks (e.g., Wi-Fi, UMTS, and LTE) have different characteristics in terms of coverage area, cost, and different capacities to cater for diverse service needs. These networks may cover the same region forming a heterogeneous wireless environment. Mobile users run different kinds of service over the Internet (e.g., video streaming, interactive video gaming, etc.). These services lead to diverse flows with different requirements in terms of Quality of Service (QoS). Current terminals (e.g., laptops and cell phones) are increasingly being provided with multiple wireless access network interfaces (e.g., UMTS, LTE, Wi-Fi) for users to not be tied to any one access network, but instead be free to switch among available networks. In this multi-technology, multi-application and multi-user environment, it would be advantageous for multihomed terminals to simultaneously use multiple networks instead of switching from one interface to another. This involves the association of each flow with a network that meets its specific requirements in a way that best maximizes the global terminal utility. Associating each flow with a suitable interface is considered as a particular case of network interface selection and is called flow/interface association throughout this paper. The main target of the flow/interface association is to satisfy individual flow's requirements while maximizing the global system performance. The flow/interface association is an optimization problem, and more specifically is related to stochastic optimization problems. This paper proposes a new flow/interface association scheme for multihomed mobile terminals in heterogeneous environment. We provide analytical studies and simulation experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach.