Towards Viable Large Scale Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

We explore radio resource allocation and management issues related to a large-scale heterogeneous (hetnet) wireless system made up of several Radio Access Technologies (RATs) that collectively provide a unified wireless network to a diverse set of users through co-ordination managed by a centralized Global Resource Controller (GRC). We incorporate 3G cellular technologies HSPA and EVDO, 4G cellular technologies WiMAX and LTE, and WLAN technology Wi-Fi as the RATs in our hetnet wireless system. We assume that the user devices are either multi-modal or have one or more reconfigurable radios which makes it possible for each device to use any available RAT at any given time subject to resource-sharing agreements. For such a hetnet system where resource allocation is coordinated at a global level, characterizing the network performance in terms of various conflicting network efficiency objectives that takes costs associated with a network re-association operation into account largely remains an open problem. Also, all the studies to-date that try to characterize the network performance of a hetnet system do not account for RAT-specific implementation details and the management overhead associated with setting up a centralized control. We study the radio resource allocation problem and the implementation/management overhead issues associated with a hetnet system in two research phases. In the first phase, we develop cost models associated with network re-association in terms of increased power consumption and communication downtime taking into account various user device assumptions. Using these cost models in our problem formulations, the first phase focuses on resource allocation strategies where we use a high-level system modeling approach to study the achievable performance in terms of conflicting network efficiency measures of spectral efficiency, overall power consumption, and instantaneous and long-term fairness for each user in the hetnet system. Our main result from this phase of study suggests that the gain in spectral efficiency due to multi-access network diversity results in a tremendous increase in overall power consumption due to frequent re-associations required by user devices. We then develop a utility function-based optimization algorithm to characterize and achieve a desired tradeoff in terms of all four network efficiency measures of spectral efficiency, overall power consumption and instantaneous and long-term fairness. We show an increase in a multi-attribute system utility measure of up to 56.7% for our algorithm compared to other widely studied resource allocation algorithms including max-sum rate, proportional fairness, max-min fairness and min power. The second phase of our research study focuses on practical implementation issues including the overhead required to implement a centralized GRC solution in a hetnet system. Through detailed protocol level simulations performed in ns-2, we show an increase in spectral efficiency of up to 99% and an increase in instantaneous fairness of up to 28.5% for two sort-based user device-to-Access Point (AP)/Base Station (BS) association algorithms implemented at the GRC that aim to maximize system spectral efficiency and instantaneous fairness performance metrics respectively compared to a distributed solution where each user makes his/her own association decision. The efficiency increase for each respective attribute again results in a tremendous increase in power consumption of up to 650% and 794% for each respective algorithm implemented at the GRC compared to a distributed solution because of frequent re-associations

Optimal Spectrum Utilization and Flow Controlling In Heterogeneous Network with Reconfigurable Devices

Fairness provisioning in heterogeneous networks is a prime issue for high-rate data flow, wherein the inter-connectivity property among different communication devices provides higher throughput. In Hetnet, optimal resource utilization is required for efficient resource usage. Proper resource allocation in such a network led to higher data flow performance for real-time applications. In view of optimal resource allocation, a resource utilization approach for a reconfigurable cognitive device with spectrum sensing capability is proposed in this paper.  The allocation of the data flow rate at device level is proposed for optimization of network fairness in a heterogeneous network.  A dynamic approach of rate-inference optimization is proposed to provide fairness in dynamic data traffic conditions. The simulation results validate the improvement in offered quality in comparison to multi-attribute optimization

Light-Fidelity as Next Generation Network Technology: A Bibliometric Survey and Analysis

This paper delivers a systematic review and a bibliometric survey analysis of Light-Fidelity (Li-Fi) indoor implementation in Next Generation Network (NGN). The main objective of this study is to design a communication network based on NGN-Li-Fi for the indoor implementation which aims to increase user Quality of Service (QoS). The main merits and contributions of this study are the thorough and detailed analysis of the review, both in literature surveys and bibliometric analysis, as well as the discussion of the implementation model challenges of Li-Fi in both indoor and outdoor environments. The issue articulated in an indoor communication network is the possibility of intermittent connectivity due to barriers caused by line-of-sight (LOS) between the LED transmitter and receiver, handover due to channel overlap, and other network reliability issues. To realize the full potential and significant benefits of the Next Generation Network, challenges in indoor communication such as load-balancing and anticipating network congestion (traffic congestion) must be addressed. The main benefit of this study is the in-depth investigation of surveys in both selected critical literatures and bibliometric approach. This study seeks to comprehend the implications of Next Generation networks for indoor communication networks, particularly for visible light communication channels

Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges

Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks, explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a "green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Capacity Enhancement Approaches for Long Term Evolution networks: Capacity Enhancement-Inspired Self-Organized Networking to Enhance Capacity and Fairness of Traffic in Long Term Evolution Networks by Utilising Dynamic Mobile Base-Stations

The long-term evolution (LTE) network has been proposed to provide better network capacity than the earlier 3G network. Driven by the market, the conventional LTE (3G) network standard could not achieve the expectations of the international mobile telecommunications advanced (IMT-Advanced) standard. To satisfy this gap, the LTE-Advanced was introduced with additional network functionalities to meet up with the IMT-Advanced Standard. In addition, due to the need to minimize operational expenditure (OPEX) and reduce human interventions, the wireless cellular networks are required to be self-aware, self-reconfigurable, self-adaptive and smart. An example of such network involves transceiver base stations (BTSs) within a self-organizing network (SON). Besides these great breakthroughs, the conventional LTE and LTE-Advanced networks have not been designed with the intelligence of scalable capacity output especially in sudden demographic changes, namely during events of football, malls, worship centres or during religious and cultural festivals. Since most of these events cannot be predicted, modern cellular networks must be scalable in terms of capacity and coverage in such unpredictable demographic surge. Thus, the use of dynamic BTSs is proposed to be used in modern and future cellular networks for crowd and demographic change managements. Dynamic BTSs are complements of the capability of SONs to search, determine and deploy less crowded/idle BTSs to densely crowded cells for scalable capacity management. The mobile BTSs will discover areas of dark coverages and fill-up the gap in terms of providing cellular services. The proposed network relieves the LTE network from overloading thus reducing packet loss, delay and improves fair load sharing. In order to trail the best (least) path, a bio-inspired optimization algorithm based on swarm-particle optimization is proposed over the dynamic BTS network. It uses the ant-colony optimization algorithm (ACOA) to find the least path. A comparison between an optimized path and the un-optimized path showed huge gain in terms of delay, fair load sharing and the percentage of packet loss