Generalized Roaming and Access Selection in Multi-Operator Environments
Johan Hultell, Miguel Berg · 2005
Abstract — In a multi-operator environment where several operators offer high-speed local wireless access, geographical sharing is an attractive way to increase the coverage and resource efficiency so that ”interesting ” services can be offered. This paper investigates two different access selection strategies for three typical environments (hotspot, urban, and suburban) to establish when, and to what extent, the performance can be improved. In the first strategy users simply connect to the strongest access point (AP) whereas the users within the second strategy connect to the AP maximizing the instantaneous aggregated capacity according a greedy algorithm. Both strategies are compared to a reference case where users connect to the strongest AP belonging to their home operator. We investigated a two-operator scenario with APs using CSMA/CA and the results indicate that a significant improvement, both in terms of coverage and resource efficiency, can be achieved if users simply connect to the strongest AP. Moreover the results show that further improvement is possible, especially in urban and hotspot environments, with more complex strategies. 1 I.