Analysis of User Experience of Access Selection in Multi-operator Environments

In future wireless systems can ambient networks technology enable the users to utilize a multitude of networks. Frequent roaming between networks will be a key characteristic of mobile services and the terms "home" and "visited" networks will be common also at local and national level. In this paper we will investigate cooperation between operators and what benefits the end users can expect. Ambient Networks concepts include new advertising, attachment and composition functionalities providing a set of tools that enable dynamic connectivity establishment. Especially end-user preferences can be taken into account during the evaluation and selection of access networks. The impact of cooperation in the multi-operator environment is analyzed in a scenario with operators that have partially overlapping radio coverage, set of provided services and a large number of moving user terminals. The results indicate substantial gains with cooperation; both for overall network utilization and for the end-user "up-time". In order to describe the end-user perception we use a performance metric called user satisfaction index (USI) proposed in the ambient networks project.