A novel WLAN roaming decision and selection scheme for mobile data offloading

The existing IEEE and 3GPP standards have laid the foundation for integrating cellular and WiFi network to deliver a seamless experience for the end-users when roaming across multiple access networks. However, in recent studies, the issue of making roaming decision and intelligently selecting the most preferable Point of Service to optimize network resource and improve end user's experience has not been considered properly. In this paper, we propose a novel cellular and WiFi roaming decision and AP selection scheme based on state of the art, 3GPP TS24.312 and IEEE 802.11u, k standards. Our proposed scheme assists the mobile nodes to decide the right timing to make roaming decision and select preferable point of service based on the operator's policies and real-time network condition. We also introduce our simulation model of a heterogeneous network with cellular and WiFi interworking as well as 3GPP ANDSF, TS24.312. It is a complete end-to-end system model from application to physical layer with considering user's mobility and realistic traffic model. The proposed scheme outperformed the conventional WiFi selection scheme in terms of dynamically steering mobile node's data traffic from macrocell to available Access Points. The proposed scheme increased the utilization and balanced the traffic load of access points and improved user's experienced throughput.