zCap: a zero configuration adaptive paging and mobility management mechanism

Today, cellular networks rely on fixed collections of cells (tracking areas) for user equipment localisation. Locating users within these areas involves broadcast search (paging), which consumes radio bandwidth but reduces the user equipment signalling required for mobility management. Tracking areas are today manually configured, hard to adapt to local mobility and influence the load on several key resources in the network. We propose a decentralised and self-adaptive approach to mobility management based on a probabilistic model of local mobility. By estimating the parameters of this model from observations of user mobility collected online, we obtain a dynamic model from which we construct local neighbourhoods of cells where we are most likely to locate user equipment. We propose to replace the static tracking areas of current systems with neighbourhoods local to each cell. The model is also used to derive a multi-phase paging scheme, where the division of neighbourhood cells into consecutive phases balances response times and paging cost. The complete mechanism requires no manual tracking area configuration and performs localisation efficiently in terms of signalling and response times. Detailed simulations show that significant potential gains in localisation effi- ciency are possible while eliminating manual configuration of mobility management parameters. Variants of the proposal can be implemented within current (LTE) standards

Design of personalized location areas for future Pcs networks

In Global Systems for Mobile Communications (GSM), always-update location strategy is used to keep track of mobile terminals within the network. However future Personal Communication Networks (PCS) will require to serve a wide range of services (digital voice, video, data, and email) and also will have to support a large population of users. Under such demands, determining the exact location of a user by traditional strategies would be difficult and would result in increasing the signaling load imposed by location-update and paging procedures. The problem is not only in increasing cost, but also in non-efficient utilization of a precious resource, i.e., radio bandwidth; In this thesis, personalized Location Areas (PLAs) are formed considering the mobility patterns of individual users in the system such that the signaling due to location update and paging is minimized. We prove that the problem in this formulation is of NP complexity. Therefore we study efficient optimization techniques able to avoid combinatorial search. Three known classes of optimization techniques are studied. They are Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search and Genetic Search. Three algorithms are designed for solving the problem. Modeling does not assume any specific cell structure or network topology that makes the proposal widely applicable. The behavior of mobile terminals in the network is modeled as Random Walk with an absorbing state and the Markov chain is used for cost analysis; Numeric simulation carried out for 25 and 100 hexagonal cell networks have shown that Simulated Annealing based algorithm outperforms other two by indicators of the runtime complexity and signaling cost of location management. The ID\u27s of cells populating the calculated area are provided to the mobile terminal and saved in its local memory every time the mobile subscriber moves out its current location area. Otherwise, no location update is performed, but only paging. Thus, at the expense of small local memory, the location management is carried more efficiently

Simulated Annealing for Location Area Planning in Cellular networks

LA planning in cellular network is useful for minimizing location management cost in GSM network. In fact, size of LA can be optimized to create a balance between the LA update rate and expected paging rate within LA. To get optimal result for LA planning in cellular network simulated annealing algorithm is used. Simulated annealing give optimal results in acceptable run-time.Comment: 7 Pages, JGraph-Hoc Journa

Enhanced distance-based location management of mobile communication systems using a cell coordinates approach

In managing the locations of mobile users in mobile communication systems, the distance-based strategy has been proven to have better performance than other dynamic strategies, but is difficult to implement. In this paper, a simple approach is introduced to implement the distance-based strategy by using the cell coordinates in calculating the physical distance traveled. This approach has the advantages of being independent of the size, shape, and distribution of cells, as well as catering for the direction of movement in addition to the speed of each mobile terminal. An enhanced distance-based location management strategy is proposed to dynamically adjust the size and shape of location area for each individual mobile terminal according to the current speed and direction of movement. It can reduce the location management signaling traffic of the distance-based strategy by half when mobile terminals have predictable directions of movement. Three types of location updating schemes are discussed, namely, Circular Location Area, Optimal Location Area, and Elliptic Location Area. Paging schemes using searching techniques such as expanding distance search based on the last reported location and based on the predicted location, and expanding direction search are also explored to further reduce paging signal traffic by partitioning location areas into paging areas.published_or_final_versio

Energy efficiency in heterogeneous wireless access networks

In this article, we bring forward the important aspect of energy savings in wireless access networks. We specifically focus on the energy saving opportunities in the recently evolving heterogeneous networks (HetNets), both Single- RAT and Multi-RAT. Issues such as sleep/wakeup cycles and interference management are discussed for co-channel Single-RAT HetNets. In addition to that, a simulation based study for LTE macro-femto HetNets is presented, indicating the need for dynamic energy efficient resource management schemes. Multi-RAT HetNets also come with challenges such as network integration, combined resource management and network selection. Along with a discussion on these challenges, we also investigate the performance of the conventional WLAN-first network selection mechanism in terms of energy efficiency (EE) and suggest that EE can be improved by the application of intelligent call admission control policies

Performance Enhancing of Heterogeneous Network through Optimisation and Machine Learning Techniques

In the last two decades, by the benefit of advanced wireless technology, growing data service cause the explosive traffic demand, and it brings many new challenges to the network operators. In order to match the growing traffic demand, operators shall deploy new base stations to increase the total cellular network capacity. Meanwhile, a new type of low-power base stations are frequently deployed within the network, providing extra access points to subscribers. However, even the new base station can be operated in low power, the total network energy consumption is still increased proportional to the total number of base station, and considerable network energy consumption will become one of the main issues to the network operators. The way of reducing network energy consumption become crucial, especially in 5G when multiple antennas are deployed within one site. However, the base station cannot be always operated in low power because it will damage the network performance, and power can be only reduced in light-traffic period. Therefore, the way of balancing traffic demand and energy consumption will be come the main investigation direction in this thesis, and how to link the operated power of base station to the current traffic demand is investigated. In this thesis, algorithms and optimisations are utilised to reduce the network energy consumption and improve the network performance. To reduce the energy consumption in light-traffic period, base stations switch-off strategy is proposed in the first chapter. However, the network performance should be carefully estimated before the switch-off strategy is applied. The NP-hard energy efficiency optimisation problem is summarised, and it proposes the method that some of the base stations can be grouped together due to the limited interference from other Pico cells, reducing the complexity of the optimisation problem. Meanwhile, simulated annealing is proposed to obtain the optimal base stations combination to achieve optimal energy efficiency. By the optimisation algorithm, it can obtain the optimal PCs combination without scarifying the overall network throughput. The simulation results show that not only the energy consumption can be reduced but also the significant energy efficiency improvement can achieve by the switched-off strategy. The average energy efficiency improvement over thirty simulation is 17.06%. The second chapter will tackle the issue of how to raise the power of base stations after they are switched off. These base stations shall back to regular power level to prepare the incoming traffic. However, not all base stations shall be back to normal power due to the uneven traffic distribution. By analysing the information within the collected subscriber data, such as moving speed, direction, downlink and time, Naive Bayesian classifier will be utilised to obtain the user movement pattern and predict the future traffic distribution, and the system can know which base station will become the user's destination. The load adaptive power control is utilised to inform the corresponding base stations to increased the transmission power, base stations can prepare for the incoming traffic, avoiding the performance degradation. The simulation results show that the machine learning can accurately predict the destination of the subscriber, achieving average 90.8% accuracy among thirty simulation. The network energy can be saved without damage the network performance after the load adaptive function is applied, the average energy efficiency improvement among three scenarios is 4.3%, the improvement is significant. The significant improvement prove that the proposed machine learning and load adaptive power modification method can help the network reduce the energy consumption. In the last chapter, it will utilise cell range expansion to tackle the resources issue in cooperative base station in joint transmission, improving downlink performance and tackle the cell-edge problem. Due to the uneven traffic distribution, it will cause the insufficient resources problem in cooperative base station in joint transmission, and the system throughput will be influenced if cooperative base station executes joint transmission in high load. Therefore, the cell range expansion is utilised to solve the problem of unbalanced traffic between base station tier, and flow water algorithm is utilised to tackle the resources distribution issue during the traffic offloading. The simulation shows the NP-hard problem can be sufficiently solved by the flow water algorithm, and the downlink throughput gain can be obtained, it can obtain 26% gain in the M-P scenario, and the gain in P-M scenario is 24%. The result prove that the proposed method can provide significant gain to the subscriber without losing any total network throughput