Design and Implementation of ETSI-Standard Reconfigurable Mobile Device for Heterogeneous Network

Abstract

In heterogeneous networks, network selection is an important task for reconfigurable mobile devices (MDs). In the reconfigurable MD architecture that has been standardized by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), the network selection functionality is handled by a software component called Mobility Policy Manager (MPM). In this paper, we present an implementation of the MPM whereby a reconfigurable MD conforming to the ETSI standard can select the most appropriate radio access network (RAN) to use. We implemented a reconfigurable MD test-bed compliant with the ETSI standard, and show that the network selection driven by the MPM enhances the throughput of the receiving MD by about 26% compared to the arbitrary network selection provided by a conventional reconfigurable MD without the functionality of MPM, verifying the functionality of the MPM.