Investigation of Bandwidth Allocation Based on Rat Selection in a Wireless Heterogeneous Network for Smart Home Application

Smart homes have gained a lot of attention in recent years. People are looking forward to receiving an opportunistic network, where they can gather communication devices within a wireless heterogeneous network. The most important issue in a wireless heterogeneous network is to manage bandwidth, due to the scarcity of this resource in wireless links, compared to wired networks. Bandwidth management inefficiency may result in an unsatisfactory performance of a network. This paper investigates bandwidth allocation based on Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection in a wireless heterogeneous smart home environment that integrates different RATs considered in the study, which are Bluetooth, cellular 3G, and Wi-Fi. The nodes/users in a smart home are served through a RAT that best fits the service requirements; with adequate bandwidth that guarantees Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. We will demonstrate the comparison between the bandwidth occupancy of each RAT using two types of service admission procedures. From the results, the bandwidth occupied by different RATs show a variation distribution depending on the service admission control procedure used. We advocate the notion of bandwidth allocation with adequate bandwidth for service application requests as a criterion to quantify the state of balance in future heterogeneous multi-RAT environments.