Optimizing Context-Aware Resource and Network Assignment in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

International audienceThis paper discusses the problem of user association and downlink resource allocation in heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs) where a mobile node (MN) can associate to a single network at a time. A context-aware optimization problem is formulated to maximize the aggregate user-centric profit in the system while taking into consideration the network constraints, user preferences, and the amount of data rate requested by each MN. To achieve its purpose, the formulated problem employs contextual information related to the MN measurements and requirements, the HWN architecture, and the available resources at each network. The user-centric profit is based on the quality of the received signal and the power consumption at the MN. The formulated optimization problem is discrete (binary) with high complexity; based on the continuous relaxation of the problem, a solution with polynomial-time complexity is proposed. It is shown through simulations that the proposed solution achieves a near-optimal performance in terms of average user-centric profit and percentage of blocked data rate. Moreover, the proposed solution requests lower number of handovers