Towards sustainable heterogeneous wireless networks: A decision strategy for AP selection with dynamic graphs

This paper considers a problem of user and access point associations in heterogeneous wireless networks consisting of multiple radio access technologies. The current association policies are mostly based on a selfish user behavior optimizing their own decision criteria. Such simple strategies, however, might fail especially in a congested place with a large number of users. From this perspective, this study propounds a strategy for optimizing the problem that aims at sustainably and fairly maximizing the minimal utility of users. The minimal utilities can be obtained from bare essentials of the quality of experience and defined by considering different requirements of each user. In order to analyze characteristics of the proposed selection strategy, we conduct simulations comparing it with the other selection method under each evaluation criterion. Numerical results suggest that the proposed selection i) enhances the total minimal utility in sustainable and fair manners, ii) indicates a distinctive trend in load balancing and iii) requires a comparable computational time and handover frequency in contrast with the other selection.