Network assisted network selection

With the growth of data-capable, multi-interface wireless and mobile devices, a lot of research work is being done on handover management and network selection in heterogeneous environment. The goal is that a user should be able to select an appropriate wireless network according to its service requirements and seamlessly handover to that network regardless of the underlying wireless technology being used. In this scenario, there is a need for a mechanism that would facilitate a particular user to select the most appropriate network in a way that is beneficial to the overall network and its users as a whole. In this paper we propose a mechanism we call Network Assisted Network Selection (NANS) that combines network-based, service-based and user-based criteria for network selection, and uses Generalized Assignment Problem (GAP) to assign the network resources to a set of users.