An Intelligent Network Selection Strategy Based on MADM Methods in Heterogeneous Networks

Providing service continuity to the end users with best quality is a very important issue in the next generation wireless communications. With the evolution of the mobile devices towards a multimode architecture and the coexistence of multitude of radio access technologies (RAT’s), the users are able to benefit simultaneously from these RAT’s. However, the major issue in heterogeneous wireless communications is how to choose the most suitable access network for mobile’s user which can be used as long as possible for communication. To achieve this issue, this paper proposes an intelligent network selection strategy which combines two multi attribute decision making (MADM) methods such as analytic network process (ANP) and the technique for order preference by similarity to an ideal solution (TOPSIS) method. The ANP method is used to find the differentiate weights of available networks by considering each criterion and the TOPSIS method is applied to rank the alternatives. Our new strategy for network selection can dealing with the limitations of MADM methods which are the ranking abnormality and the ping-ponf effect.