4G Converged Environment: Modeling Network Selection as a Game

Abstract

Network selection mechanism in 4G mobile networks is a newly introduced mechanism that handles the selection of the best network to satisfy a service request. Network selection needs to take part prior to admission of the service in a particular access network participating in the 4G system. This paper proposes to model this decision using a game theoretic approach; specifically defining a game between the access networks themselves, competing in a non-cooperative manner to maximize their payoff. The outcome of the game is a decision of which subset of the set of service requests made to the 4G converged system should be admitted by each access network.