On terminal utility for multiple flow/interface association in mobile terminals

Recent technological developments in mobile networks arena have led manufacturers to incorporate multiple radio network interfaces in modern day mobile terminals. On the other hand, the availability of a diverse range of access networks makes it possible for mobile terminals to connect to several types of networks simultaneously. In such a scenario, a mobile terminal can increase its utility by optimizing the usage of the available access networks and providing each application with a network best suitable to its specific requirements. In this paper, we propose a multiple flow/interface association scheme that allows associating several applications to the available network interfaces simultaneously while maximizing the terminal global utility. We perform a comparative study of different stochastic heuristic methods and propose an oriented diversification of the Tabu search algorithm that improves the search performance. With the help of simulation results, we show that our proposed method outperforms others.