PAWES: a flow distribution algorithm based on priority and weight self-production

This paper focuses on the issue of flow distribution for multimode mobile terminals in heterogeneous networks, and proposes a flow distribution algorithm based on priority and weight self-production mechanism. The algorithm utilizes the notion of "priority", assigning higher priorities to more important sessions, therefore ensuring these sessions have the preferential utilization of the network resources. In addition, this paper proposes a new method to automatically determine the weights of the multiple attributes which influence the session flow distribution decision, thus avoiding the difficulty and irrationality when relying on the users to specify the weights directly. Simulation results show that our algorithm can efficiently distribute the session flows on a multimode mobile terminal to the appropriate networks for transmission based on the current conditions of different access networks, and on the QoS requirements of different types of sessions. The decisions made by our algorithm reduce the monetary cost and power consumption of the communication as well as guarantee the QoS of different types of sessions. Finally, our algorithm offers significant improvements in performance indicators such as adjacency to the optimal network and session completion rate.