Multi-Radio Access Selection to Reduce Reorder Buffer Requirements in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with Multi- homed Mobile Terminals

Aggregating bandwidth from multiple radio access technologies (RATs) provides an opportunity for network providers to enhance network capacity. This is important for serving applications that require more bandwidth than a single RAT can offer. One of the important elements of bandwidth aggregation is the selection of a suitable set of RATs to achieve efficient aggregation. In this paper, we propose a multi-radio access selection scheme for selecting an appropriate set of RATs to achieve the desired bandwidth aggregation for a connection request initiated by a multi-homed terminal in a heterogeneous wireless network. The objective of the proposed scheme is to reduce the need for packet reordering at the receiver whenever possible. The operation of the proposed scheme is explained in details. Keywords-bandwidth aggregation; radio access technology; heterogeneous wireless network; multi-mode terminal;