Quantitative Comparison of Resource Management Strategies in UMTS-WLAN Integration at the Radio Access Level

The WLAN integration at the UMTS radio access level is a promising interworking approach, which provides the mobile operator with additional license-free bandwidth, enhances vertical handover performance and facilitates common management of all the available radio resources. The benefits are achieved at cost of various modifications of the UMTS radio access network. The modifications may be designed in different ways and may result in different architectural options with different performance. In; this paper, we present quantitative comparison of three architectural options, putting the focus on the initial radio interface selection algorithm.