Autonomic communications: Exploiting advanced and game theoretical techniques for RAT selection and protocol reconfiguration

The Autonomic Communications concept emerges as one of the most promising solutions for future heterogeneous systems networking. This notion implies the introduction of advanced mechanisms for autonomic decision making and self-configuration. To this end, this paper proposes an integrated framework that facilitates autonomic features to capture the needs for RAT selection and device reconfiguration in a Composite Radio Environment. Specifically, a game theoretical approach targeted to the definition of appropriate policies for distributed equipment elements is presented. Thus, the user terminals are able to exploit context information in order to i) identify an optimum trade-off for (multiple) Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection and ii) adapt the protocol stack and respective protocol functionality using a proposed component based framework for transparent protocol component replacement. Simulation and performance results finally show that the proposed mechanisms lead to efficient resource management, minimizing the complexity on the network and terminal side as well as keeping the required signaling overhead as low as possible.