A New Economic History-Based Algorithm for Network Selection in the Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Nowadays, with the development of technology in the telecommunications systems, next generation networks in a heterogeneous environment with different technologies such as WiFi, WiMax and UMTS are developed and integrated schemes can provide different class of services for users, anywhere and anytime. In the networks, network selection as an important mechanism affects in heterogeneous network performance in term of users' quality of service and efficiency. In this paper, an autonomic network selection algorithm is proposed based on utility function included quality of service (QoS) metrics, power consumption and price utilizing past experience of user's delivered service. Since, different networks in the studied environment have a different dynamic pricing policy, such as discount-based usage, residence time of the users according to network coverage, user velocity and user preference are considered in the proposed algorithm as a network selection criteria to maximize user's utility. Simulation results show that proposed algorithm improves obtained utility by users compared with other method and performance parameter number of handoffs decreases.