The Ambient Networks Heterogeneous Access Selection Architecture

Forthcoming wireless communications will be characterized by the ubiquity of multiaccess. Despite the inherently increased complexity, end-users should be able to take advantage of the most suitable access network. Thus, access selection in an environment with different overlapping radio technologies is of central interest and an architecture is needed that performs equally well on single- and multi-operator scenarios, considers several parameters, and respects the principle of layering. In this paper, we introduce the Ambient Networks heterogeneous access selection architecture explaining how it meets such requirements. We present the essential architectural components and explain their interactions. We illustrate how the proposed architecture works in practice and discuss recent results form our prototype-based validation.