Petri net modelling of network selection for integrated cellular/WLAN networks

Nowadays, the two most popular wireless networks, the third generation (3G) cellular networks and wireless local area networks (WLANs) are being deployed widely. Network selection becomes an essential issue when network operators integrate multiple access networks to enhance service provisioning. There have been many researches on various network selection schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel modelling approach based on Petri net to effectively analyze the performance of a randomized network selection scheme, which is actually a generalized extension of simple network selection algorithms such as the WLAN-first scheme. The Petri net-based modelling approach can characterize the complex user mobility and network selection procedure in a straightforward manner. To further address a large state space, we also develop a decomposition approach for the Petri net model to efficiently evaluate the system performance. Numerical results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and low complexity of our proposed approaches.