Dual priority: a real‐time and integrated, device‐and‐network‐centric wireless network selection

Over the last 5–7 years, with the proliferation of mobile computing devices, there has been a tremendous increase in data usage by mobile subscribers. This has quite often resulted in network congestion, forcing the operators to either increase the available bandwidth or reduce the data‐rate per subscriber. To overcome this problem, network operators have been deploying different radio access networks, including Wi‐Fi and small cells across their coverage areas. In order to remain always best connected, several techniques have been proposed over the period for efficient network selection. All these techniques can be broadly categorised into either device‐centric or network‐centric solutions. However, both device‐centric and network‐centric solutions have their disadvantages. In this study, a ‘dual priority’ scheme is proposed and developed that takes into account the preferences of both the subscribers and the network operator. Notably, the proposed ‘dual priority’ scheme offers a combined decision for the efficient handover of subscribers from cellular to Wi‐Fi. In this work, every device has its own mechanism of ranking its preferred networks, after which the network takes the decision for offload based on the preferences and its resource availability. It has been observed that the proposed dual priority scheme results in up‐to three times reduction in the time taken for offloading decision as compared to state‐of‐the‐art network‐centric solutions.