Heterogeneous Wireless Network Selection: Load Balancing and Multicast Scenario

The increasing demand for real-time multimedia streaming from mobile users makes important deployment of network selection in wireless networks. Coexistence of various wireless access networks and ability of mobile terminals to switch between them make an optimal selection of serving mobile networks for groups of mobile clients a challenging problem. Since scalability can easily become a bottleneck in large-scale networks, we study the decision-making process and selection of the data that needs to be exchanged between different network components. In this paper, we present two decentralized solutions to this problem that we compare and evaluate in the OMNet++ simulation environment. Keywords—Wireless networking; mobile network selection; decentralized algorithms.