Heterogeneous wireless network (HWN) technology has emerged in the next generation mobile networks, which enables mobile client (MC) to simultaneously communicate with multiple heterogeneous access networks for better quality of services (QoS) and lower service cost. By the context of conventional network protocols, separately and independently operating network interfaces cannot fully utilize the potential of a HWN.
In this thesis, we model and analyze a HWN and system. The issues are identified as the multi-MAC management between MCs and access networks, and the multi-network (multi-NET) management between application servers and access networks. We propose a multi-MAC management scheme over multiple heterogeneous interface MACs to optimize multi-application performance with network selection and rate allocation for uplink traffic. We also propose a multi-NET management scheme for multi-user performance optimization in the downlink traffic, which is network-centric and distributes traffic into multiple access networks by supporting the inter-networking operations. Besides necessary optimization algorithms, procedures to implement our schemes are also provided.