Software-Defined Mobility Management and Base Station Control for Green Cellular Networks

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on March 24, 2016Dissertation advisor: Baek-Young ChoiVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 106-116)Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2015Mobile communication systems have revolutionized in order to fulfill exponentially increasing data traffic volume due to the introduction of new devices such as smartphones and tablets and success of social networking services. Evolving cellular networks include emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). SDN is an emerging network architecture that allows dynamic and flexible network operations with centralized controller. NFV addresses the problem of a large and increasing number of hardware appliances and focuses on optimizing the network services themselves. With SDN and NFV, cellular networks are able to provide more flexible and agile management that can better align and support the mobile users. In this dissertation, we address location management and handover to reduce data traffic toward the core network and to reduce energy consumption. Location management is a key control task in cellular network operations. We propose and develop an efficient group location management scheme as a virtualized network function for group cellular applications. The performance improvement is mainly achieved by the virtualized and separate group management architecture and an efficient dynamic group profiling algorithm. We conduct theoretical analyses of our scheme for signaling costs and performance gains under diverse traffic conditions. Furthermore, we carry out extensive evaluations using both real traces and synthetic human mobility data, and we validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme in both location updates and paging. Moreover, in order to tackle the issues of mounting deployments and large energy consumption of base stations, it is integral to devise schemes to improve energy efficiency in cellular networks. We propose a virtualized network function of cell management on an SDN architecture. We develop a cell management algorithm on the architecture that can effectively control the sleep and awake modes of base stations and perform handover operations in a cellular network. It provides significant benefits over current cellular networks that suffer from inflexible management and complex control. Our extensive trace-driven evaluation results show that the proposed control architecture and the cell management algorithm achieve significant energy savings, and incur less control message exchanges, more cells in a sleep mode for longer durations, and less cell status changes than existing energy saving approaches for cellular networks.Introduction -- Background -- Related work -- Dynamic location management service -- eNodeB control with SDN and NVF for energy saving -- Summary -- Future wor

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems