WLAN hot spots to increase UMTS capacity

The seamless integration of heterogeneous wireless access networks is currently one of the issues of major interest in the field of telecommunication systems. In an early future technologies like UMTS, WLAN and WiMAX will give broadband access to users that perform their voice/video calls or data sessions without knowledge of the specific technology their terminals are using, following the paradigm of always best connected. In this scenario, UMTS and WLAN integration has a primary role, due to the coverage of cellular systems and the low cost of the latter technology. This work, in particular, focuses on the gain in terms of capacity that the deployment ofWLAN access points allows in an area fully covered by an UMTS network, assuming that the radio resources are not managed by complex multi radio resource management algorithms. For this scope a real scenario is accurately simulated and the end users perception is evaluated taking care of all aspects related to each level of the protocol stack, with particular attention to radio propagation. ©2010 IEEE.