AHP and Cooperative Game Theory Based Network Selection Scheme for Smart Devices

Abstract

Smart devices which are becoming more popular today, to communicate effectively with other communication tools (e.g. phone calls, web browsing, etc.), it is crucial to know which network devices are connected. Thus, it is possible to get the best efficiency for the devices by carefully selecting the network. The network selection scenario in this study has four different traffic classes for four candidate networks (UMTS, GSM, WLAN, LTE-A) and mobile terminal with six different criteria. The analytic hierarchy process, a multi-criteria decision-making method, is used to determine which criterion is more important when considering each traffic class. In this study, the weights obtained from the AHP prepared in a ranking of importance among the criteria. Then, the potential resource values that candidate networks have and that they will provide to the users have been implemented using cooperative game theory. This resource allocation has been calculated by nucleolus method, which is an important solution method in cooperative game theory. When the results obtained after this calculation analyzed, we find that LTE-A candidate network is the best choice for three traffic classes. The results of the study demonstrate the selection criteria of a mobile terminal and the LTE-A network is the best choice for achieving the highest efficiency in all traffic classes.