Seamless Connectivity in WLAN and Cellular Networks with Multi Criteria Decision Making

The evolution of today´s wireless and mobile technologies and personalized hand-held devices has increased the challenge to handle the trade-off between mobility, performance and cost. The user simply needs to be Always Best Connected (ABC). To make this happen, different types of criteria reflecting relevant characteristics of wireless and mobile access networks such as WLAN, UMTS and GPRS have to be established and judged. In this paper the criteria are divided into three main groups, performance, cost and accessibility. The criteria are fed into a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) tool which is able to deliver a ranking of network links in order to become ABC. Finally, a case study with two different Generic Services (GSs) illustrates the decision making process and its outcomes in different situations.