Self-organising network management for heterogeneous LTE-advanced networks

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonSince 2004, when the Long Term Evolution (LTE) was first proposed to be publicly available in the year 2009, a plethora of new characteristics, techniques and applications have been constantly enhancing it since its first release, over the past decade. As a result, the research aims for LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) have been released to create a ubiquitous and supportive network for mobile users. The incorporation of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) has been proposed as one of the main enhancements of LTE-A systems over the existing LTE releases, by proposing the deployment of small-cell applications, such as femtocells, to provide more coverage and quality of service (QoS) within the network, whilst also reducing capital expenditure. These principal advantages can be obtained at the cost of new challenges such as inter-cell interference, which occurs when different network applications share the same frequency channel in the network. In this thesis, the main challenges of HetNets in LTE-A platform have been addressed and novel solutions are proposed by using self-organising network (SON) management approaches, which allows the cooperative cellular systems to observe, decide and amend their ongoing operation based on network conditions. The novel SON algorithms are modelled and simulated in OPNET modeler simulation software for the three processes of resource allocation, mobility management and interference coordination in multi-tier macro-femto networks. Different channel allocation methods based on cooperative transmission, frequency reuse and dynamic spectrum access are investigated and a novel SON sub-channel allocation method is proposed based on hybrid fractional frequency reuse (HFFR) scheme to provide dynamic resource allocation between macrocells and femtocells, while avoiding co-tier and cross-tier interference. Mobility management is also addressed as another important issue in HetNets, especially in hand-ins from macrocell to femtocell base stations. The existing research considers a limited number of methods for handover optimisation, such as signal strength and call admission control (CAC) to avoid unnecessary handovers, while our novel SON handover management method implements a comprehensive algorithm that performs sensing process, as well as resource availability and user residence checks to initiate the handover process at the optimal time. In addition to this, the novel femto over macro priority (FoMP) check in this process also gives the femtocell target nodes priority over the congested macrocells in order to improve the QoS at both the network tiers. Inter-cell interference, as the key challenge of HetNets, is also investigated by research on the existing time-domain, frequency-domain and power control methods. A novel SON interference mitigation algorithm is proposed, which is based on enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC) with power control process. The 3-phase power control algorithm contains signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) measurements, channel quality indicator (CQI) mapping and transmission power amendments to avoid the occurrence of interference due to the effects of high transmission power. The results of this research confirm that if heterogeneous systems are backed-up with SON management strategies, not only can improve the network capacity and QoS, but also the new network challenges such as inter-cell interference can also be mitigated in new releases of LTE-A network

Radio network management in cognitive LTE-Femtocell Systems

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.There is a strong uptake of femtocell deployment as small cell application platforms in the upcoming LTE networks. In such two-tier networks of LTEfemtocell base stations, a large portion of the assigned spectrum is used sporadically leading to underutilisation of valuable frequency resources. Novel spectrum access techniques are necessary to solve these current spectrum inefficiency problems. Therefore, spectrum management solutions should have the features to improve spectrum access in both temporal and spatial manner. Cognitive Radio (CR) with the Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) is considered to be the key technology in this research in order to increase the spectrum efficiency. This is an effective solution to allow a group of Secondary Users (SUs) to share the radio spectrum initially allocated to the Primary User (PUs) at no interference. The core aim of this thesis is to develop new cognitive LTE-femtocell systems that offer a 4G vision, to facilitate the radio network management in order to increase the network capacity and further improve spectrum access probabilities. In this thesis, a new spectrum management model for cognitive radio networks is considered to enable a seamless integration of multi-access technology with existing networks. This involves the design of efficient resource allocation algorithms that are able to respond to the rapid changes in the dynamic wireless environment and primary users activities. Throughout this thesis a variety of network upgraded functions are developed using application simulation scenarios. Therefore, the proposed algorithms, mechanisms, methods, and system models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have a wider applicability to be used in other technologies. This thesis mainly investigates three aspects of research issues relating to the efficient management of cognitive networks: First, novel spectrum resource management modules are proposed to maximise the spectrum access by rapidly detecting the available transmission opportunities. Secondly, a developed pilot power controlling algorithm is introduced to minimise the power consumption by considering mobile position and application requirements. Also, there is investigation on the impact of deploying different numbers of femtocell base stations in LTE domain to identify the optimum cell size for future networks. Finally, a novel call admission control mechanism for mobility management is proposed to support seamless handover between LTE and femtocell domains. This is performed by assigning high speed mobile users to the LTE system to avoid unnecessary handovers. The proposed solutions were examined by simulation and numerical analysis to show the strength of cognitive femtocell deployment for the required applications. The results show that the new system design based on cognitive radio configuration enable an efficient resource management in terms of spectrum allocation, adaptive pilot power control, and mobile handover. The proposed framework and algorithms offer a novel spectrum management for self organised LTE-femtocell architecture. Eventually, this research shows that certain architectures fulfilling spectrum management requirements are implementable in practice and display good performance in dynamic wireless environments which recommends the consideration of CR systems in LTE and femtocell networks

Game Theory for Multi-Access Edge Computing:Survey, Use Cases, and Future Trends

Game theory (GT) has been used with significant success to formulate, and either design or optimize, the operation of many representative communications and networking scenarios. The games in these scenarios involve, as usual, diverse players with conflicting goals. This paper primarily surveys the literature that has applied theoretical games to wireless networks, emphasizing use cases of upcoming multiaccess edge computing (MEC). MEC is relatively new and offers cloud services at the network periphery, aiming to reduce service latency backhaul load, and enhance relevant operational aspects such as quality of experience or security. Our presentation of GT is focused on the major challenges imposed by MEC services over the wireless resources. The survey is divided into classical and evolutionary games. Then, our discussion proceeds to more specific aspects which have a considerable impact on the game's usefulness, namely, rational versus evolving strategies, cooperation among players, available game information, the way the game is played (single turn, repeated), the game's model evaluation, and how the model results can be applied for both optimizing resource-constrained resources and balancing diverse tradeoffs in real edge networking scenarios. Finally, we reflect on lessons learned, highlighting future trends and research directions for applying theoretical model games in upcoming MEC services, considering both network design issues and usage scenarios

Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Scheme for Heterogeneous Network: BER Analysis

The latest advancement in wireless communication technology enables mobile users to communicate with each other more easily and at a very high speed. With the developed technology that encourages fast delivery of data and signal, mobile users can experience the best kind of service provided by the network operators. However, with the increasing number of users in an area that consists of femtocell and macrocell users, the data and signal transmission can sometimes be corrupted with the presence of cross-tier interference. This interference occurs when the femtocell and macrocell operate in the same carrier frequency. Therefore, such interference mitigation method must be implemented in order to maximize the throughput and increase the spectral efficiency of a wireless network. In this paper, a Dynamic Spectrum Allocation (DSA) scheme is proposed in order to correlate with the bit error rate, which will in turn contribute to throughput maximization factor in a heterogeneous network

Improving Capacity and Energy Efficiency of Femtocell Based Cellular Network Through Cell Biasing

Abstract-Future of cellular networks lies in heterogeneity. Heterogeneous cellular networks are characterized by overlay of low power nodes such as microcells, picocells, and femtocells along with traditional macrocell base stations. These nodes help operators to improve system capacity in cost effective manner while making the environment greener by reducing the carbon footprint. Research has shown that femtocells can be an effective solution to handle the increasing demands for indoor mobile traffic. However, low utilization of femtocell resources limits the gain obtained from their large scale deployment. Also, random placement of femtocells accumulate additional interference to macrocell users. In this paper, we introduce the concept of cell biasing for femtocells to improve user association and resource utilization. Our work analyses the effects of cell biasing on femtocell based cellular network and provides improvement in capacity and energy efficiency of the network through frequency reuse and subchannel power control. The obtained analytical results are verified through simulation

Spectrum- and Energy-Efficient Radio Resource Allocation for Wireless Communications

Wireless communications has been evolved significantly over the last decade. During this period, higher quality of service (QoS) requirements have been proposed to support various services. In addition, due to the increasing number of wireless devices and transmission, the energy consumption of the wireless networks becomes a burden. Therefore, the energy efficiency is considered as important as spectrum efficiency for future wireless communications networks, and spectrum and energy efficiency have become essential research topics in wireless communications. Moreover, due to the exploding of number mobile devices, the limited radio resources have become more and more scarce. With large numbers of users and various QoS requirements, a lot of wireless communications networks and techniques have emerged and how to effectively manage the limited radio resources become much more important. In this dissertation, we focus our research on spectrum- and energy-efficient resource allocation schemes in wireless communication networks. Recently, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) have been proposed and studied to improve the spectrum efficiency. In a two-tier heterogeneous network, small base stations reuse the same spectrum with macro base stations in order to support more transmission over the limited frequency bands. We design a cascaded precoding scheme considering both interference cancellation and power allocation for the two-tier heterogeneous network. Besides heterogeneous networks, as the fast development of intelligent transportation, we study the spectrum- and energy-efficient resource allocation in vehicular communication networks. The intelligent transportation and vehicular communications both have drawn much attention and are faced special wireless environment, which includes Doppler effects and severe uncertainties in channel estimation. A novel designed spectrum efficiency scheme is studied and verified. With consideration of energy efficiency, the device-to-device (D2D) enabled wireless network is an effective network structure to increase the usage of spectrum. From a device\u27s perspective, we design an energy-efficient resource allocation scheme in D2D communication networks. To improve the energy efficiency of wireless communication networks, energy harvesting technique is a powerful way. Recently, the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has been proposed as a promising energy harvesting method for wireless communication networks, based on which we derive an energy-efficient resource allocation scheme for SWIPT cooperative networks, which considers both the power and relay allocation. In addition to the schemes derivation for spectrum- and energy-efficient resource allocation, simulation results and the proofs of the proposed propositions are provided for the completeness of this dissertation

Distributed spectrum leasing via cooperation

“Cognitive radio” networks enable the coexistence of primary (licensed) and secondary (unlicensed) terminals. Conventional frameworks, namely commons and property-rights models, while being promising in certain aspects, appear to have significant drawbacks for implementation of large-scale distributed cognitive radio networks, due to the technological and theoretical limits on the ability of secondary activity to perform effective spectrum sensing and on the stringent constraints on protocols and architectures. To address the problems highlighted above, the framework of distributed spectrum leasing via cross-layer cooperation (DiSC) has been recently proposed as a basic mechanism to guide the design of decentralized cognitive radio networks. According to this framework, each primary terminal can ”lease” a transmission opportunity to a local secondary terminal in exchange for cooperation (relaying) as long as secondary quality-of-service (QoS) requirements are satisfied. The dissertation starts by investigating the performance bounds from an information-theoretical standpoint by focusing on the scenario of a single primary user and multiple secondary users with private messages. Achievable rate regions are derived for discrete memoryless and Gaussian models by considering Decode-and-Forward (DF), with both standard and parity-forwarding techniques, and Compress-and-Forward (CF), along with superposition coding at the secondary nodes. Then a framework is proposed that extends the analysis to multiple primary users and multiple secondary users by leveraging the concept of Generalized Nash Equilibrium. Accordingly, multiple primary users, each owning its own spectral resource, compete for the cooperation of the available secondary users under a shared constraint on all spectrum leasing decisions set by the secondary QoS requirements. A general formulation of the problem is given and solutions are proposed with different signaling requirements among the primary users. The novel idea of interference forwarding as a mechanism to enable DiSC is proposed, whereby primary users lease part of their spectrum to the secondary users if the latter assist by forwarding information about the interference to enable interference mitigation at the primary receivers. Finally, an application of DiSC in multi-tier wireless networks such as femtocells overlaid by macrocells whereby the femtocell base station acts as a relay for the macrocell users is presented. The performance advantages of the proposed application are evaluated by studying the transmission reliability of macro and femto users for a quasi-static fading channel in terms of outage probability and diversity-multiplexing trade-off for uplink and, more briefly, for downlink