Novel cognitive mobile router and its efficient use in a heterogeneous wireless network

In this paper, we discuss the efficient use of a mobile router with multiple radio access technologies (RATs), called a cognitive mobile router (C-MR). In a heterogeneous wireless network, where various infrastructure-based RATs have already been deployed, C-MR selects a high quality RAT from among those available and provides a high quality mobile communication to connecting Wi-Fi user terminals. However, considering the significant growth in mobile data traffic, a huge amount of mobile data passes through C-MR and critical packet losses may occur due to its limited computational resources. Moreover, if the quality of the selected RAT is insufficient, incoming packets are stacked in C-MR and this leads to performance degradation due to packet loss, timeout and so forth. In this paper, we propose two novel schemes to avoid such redundant performance degradation, one is a novel packet queuing scheme that operates such a huge amount of mobile data traffic properly even with the limited computational resources. The other is an energy-efficient and accurate RAT quality selection method that avoids miss-selection of a suitable RAT. Through computer simulations, we have confirmed that C-MR deployment can realize more 40% packets delivery with higher priority compared with the no C-MR situation even while maintaining lower infrastructure load and lower power consumption of user terminals.