Available Link Bandwidth Based Network Selection in Multi-access Networks

In a heterogeneous wireless environment, one of the important aspects of seamless communication for ubiquitous computing is the dynamic selection of the best access network. The problem of access network selection has been addressed through various decision methods based on available network information. Available link bandwidth is one of the important information parameters, which can be used as criterion for network selection. In this paper, we consider available bandwidth as a dynamic parameter to select the network in heterogeneous environment. First, we propose a bootstrap approximation based technique to estimate available bandwidth and then utilize it for the selection of the best suitable network in the heterogeneous environment consisting of 2G and 3G standards based wireless networks. The proposed algorithm is implemented in temporal and spatial domains to check its robustness. Estimation time with varying size of files is used as the performance metric. Through numerical results, it is shown that the proposed algorithm gives improved performance as compared to the existing algorithm.