Packet-switched network selection with the highest QoS in 4G networks

The evolution of telecommunications during the last decades has been enormous and as a result, nowadays, people find themselves before the challenge of 4G networks. Due to the fact that the latter constitute an environment of heterogeneous networks, their integration in terms of the Quality of Service (QoS) offered is of crucial importance. In general, the topic of this paper is to integrate the parameters that define QoS. Specifically, the main scope of this paper is the development of a process to evaluate three packet-switched networks (UMTS, WLAN and GPRS) in reference to the QoS offered and finally, the selection of the network that offers the highest standard for QoS. In order to achieve the above goal, there has been an attempt to distinguish the most important QoS indicators that characterize packet-switched networks and a few processes have been developed in order to either estimate the contribution of each parameter to the total QoS, or identify the weak points of a network. Apparently, each of these processes approaches the term of QoS in a different way and gives results of different usefulness.