A RAT selection mechanism in emergency scenarios

RAT selection mechanisms focus on situations in heterogeneous networking environments where a certain access network (or a portion of it) fails and a number of users should be assigned to other active access networks. This paper proposes a novel RAT selection mechanism specifically tailored for emergency situations. The proposed mechanism, named sorting applications in emergency situations (SAES), aims to boost the performance of RAT selection and outperform existing RAT selection schemes under emergency scenarios. The paper conducts an analytical performance comparison between SAES and a common RAT selection mechanism in terms of load balancing and blocking probability. The results show that SAES improves upon the performance characteristics and may be used for providing increased network performance in future wireless networks.