Simulations on Heterogeneous Networking

Nowadays heterogeneity of communication tech- nologies would allow nodes to be optimally connected nearly anytime and anywhere. Unfortunately, the different technologies are not designed for seamless interworking. The heterogeneity is often perceived as a hurdle instead of an enabler for being always best connected. The dynamic selection and configuration of the most appropriate technology is by far too complex for the end user, especially when considering ad-hoc connections. The concept of Cellular Assisted Heterogeneous Networking (CAHN) provides a framework to offer convenient and secure man- agement of heterogeneous end-to-end sessions between nodes. Furthermore, the proposed out-of-band signaling enables the seamless integration of ad-hoc links to offer best performance whenever nodes are within vicinity. The introduced separation of the signaling and the data plane allows to switch on power demanding broadband interfaces like GPRS, UMTS, or even WLAN only if actually required, i.e., data has to be sent or received). In this paper we present the potential benefits resulting from these two features enabled by CAHN. Extensive simulations show that both, the integration of ad-hoc links and the selective activation of high power broadband interfaces, can significantly increase the efficiency of heterogeneous sessions in terms of throughput and energy consumption.