Resource Management in Converged Optical and Millimeter Wave Radio Networks: A Review

Three convergent processes are likely to shape the future of the internet beyond-5G: The convergence of optical and millimeter wave radio networks to boost mobile internet capacity, the convergence of machine learning solutions and communication technologies, and the convergence of virtualized and programmable network management mechanisms towards fully integrated autonomic network resource management. The integration of network virtualization technologies creates the incentive to customize and dynamically manage the resources of a network, making network functions, and storage capabilities at the edge key resources similar to the available bandwidth in network communication channels. Aiming to understand the relationship between resource management, virtualization, and the dense 5G access and fronthaul with an emphasis on converged radio and optical communications, this article presents a review of how resource management solutions have dealt with optimizing millimeter wave radio and optical resources from an autonomic network management perspective. A research agenda is also proposed by identifying current state-of-the-art solutions and the need to shift all the convergent issues towards building an advanced resource management mechanism for beyond-5G

Cloud technologies for flexible 5G radio access networks

The evolution toward 5G mobile networks will be characterized by an increasing number of wireless devices, increasing device and service complexity, and the requirement to access mobile services ubiquitously. Two key enablers will allow the realization of the vision of 5G: very dense deployments and centralized processing. This article discusses the challenges and requirements in the design of 5G mobile networks based on these two key enablers. It discusses how cloud technologies and flexible functionality assignment in radio access networks enable network densification and centralized operation of the radio access network over heterogeneous backhaul networks. The article describes the fundamental concepts, shows how to evolve the 3GPP LTE architecture, and outlines the expected benefits.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 317941-project iJOIN, http://www.ict-ijoin.eu.Publicad

An Innovative RAN Architecture for Emerging Heterogeneous Networks: The Road to the 5G Era

The global demand for mobile-broadband data services has experienced phenomenal growth over the last few years, driven by the rapid proliferation of smart devices such as smartphones and tablets. This growth is expected to continue unabated as mobile data traffic is predicted to grow anywhere from 20 to 50 times over the next 5 years. Exacerbating the problem is that such unprecedented surge in smartphones usage, which is characterized by frequent short on/off connections and mobility, generates heavy signaling traffic load in the network signaling storms . This consumes a disproportion amount of network resources, compromising network throughput and efficiency, and in extreme cases can cause the Third-Generation (3G) or 4G (long-term evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A)) cellular networks to crash. As the conventional approaches of improving the spectral efficiency and/or allocation additional spectrum are fast approaching their theoretical limits, there is a growing consensus that current 3G and 4G (LTE/LTE-A) cellular radio access technologies (RATs) won\u27t be able to meet the anticipated growth in mobile traffic demand. To address these challenges, the wireless industry and standardization bodies have initiated a roadmap for transition from 4G to 5G cellular technology with a key objective to increase capacity by 1000Ã? by 2020 . Even though the technology hasn\u27t been invented yet, the hype around 5G networks has begun to bubble. The emerging consensus is that 5G is not a single technology, but rather a synergistic collection of interworking technical innovations and solutions that collectively address the challenge of traffic growth. The core emerging ingredients that are widely considered the key enabling technologies to realize the envisioned 5G era, listed in the order of importance, are: 1) Heterogeneous networks (HetNets); 2) flexible backhauling; 3) efficient traffic offload techniques; and 4) Self Organizing Networks (SONs). The anticipated solutions delivered by efficient interworking/ integration of these enabling technologies are not simply about throwing more resources and /or spectrum at the challenge. The envisioned solution, however, requires radically different cellular RAN and mobile core architectures that efficiently and cost-effectively deploy and manage radio resources as well as offload mobile traffic from the overloaded core network. The main objective of this thesis is to address the key techno-economics challenges facing the transition from current Fourth-Generation (4G) cellular technology to the 5G era in the context of proposing a novel high-risk revolutionary direction to the design and implementation of the envisioned 5G cellular networks. The ultimate goal is to explore the potential and viability of cost-effectively implementing the 1000x capacity challenge while continuing to provide adequate mobile broadband experience to users. Specifically, this work proposes and devises a novel PON-based HetNet mobile backhaul RAN architecture that: 1) holistically addresses the key techno-economics hurdles facing the implementation of the envisioned 5G cellular technology, specifically, the backhauling and signaling challenges; and 2) enables, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, the support of efficient ground-breaking mobile data and signaling offload techniques, which significantly enhance the performance of both the HetNet-based RAN and LTE-A\u27s core network (Evolved Packet Core (EPC) per 3GPP standard), ensure that core network equipment is used more productively, and moderate the evolving 5G\u27s signaling growth and optimize its impact. To address the backhauling challenge, we propose a cost-effective fiber-based small cell backhaul infrastructure, which leverages existing fibered and powered facilities associated with a PON-based fiber-to-the-Node/Home (FTTN/FTTH)) residential access network. Due to the sharing of existing valuable fiber assets, the proposed PON-based backhaul architecture, in which the small cells are collocated with existing FTTN remote terminals (optical network units (ONUs)), is much more economical than conventional point-to-point (PTP) fiber backhaul designs. A fully distributed ring-based EPON architecture is utilized here as the fiber-based HetNet backhaul. The techno-economics merits of utilizing the proposed PON-based FTTx access HetNet RAN architecture versus that of traditional 4G LTE-A\u27s RAN will be thoroughly examined and quantified. Specifically, we quantify the techno-economics merits of the proposed PON-based HetNet backhaul by comparing its performance versus that of a conventional fiber-based PTP backhaul architecture as a benchmark. It is shown that the purposely selected ring-based PON architecture along with the supporting distributed control plane enable the proposed PON-based FTTx RAN architecture to support several key salient networking features that collectively significantly enhance the overall performance of both the HetNet-based RAN and 4G LTE-A\u27s core (EPC) compared to that of the typical fiber-based PTP backhaul architecture in terms of handoff capability, signaling overhead, overall network throughput and latency, and QoS support. It will also been shown that the proposed HetNet-based RAN architecture is not only capable of providing the typical macro-cell offloading gain (RAN gain) but also can provide ground-breaking EPC offloading gain. The simulation results indicate that the overall capacity of the proposed HetNet scales with the number of deployed small cells, thanks to LTE-A\u27s advanced interference management techniques. For example, if there are 10 deployed outdoor small cells for every macrocell in the network, then the overall capacity will be approximately 10-11x capacity gain over a macro-only network. To reach the 1000x capacity goal, numerous small cells including 3G, 4G, and WiFi (femtos, picos, metros, relays, remote radio heads, distributed antenna systems) need to be deployed indoors and outdoors, at all possible venues (residences and enterprises)

QoS-aware Adaptive Resource Management in OFDMA Networks

PhDOne important feature of the future communication network is that users in the network are required to experience a guaranteed high quality of service (QoS) due to the popularity of multimedia applications. This thesis studies QoS-aware radio resource management schemes in different OFDMA network scenarios. Motivated by the fact that in current 4G networks, the QoS provisioning is severely constrained by the availability of radio resources, especially the scarce spectrum as well as the unbalanced traffic distribution from cell to cell, a joint antenna and subcarrier management scheme is proposed to maximise user satisfaction with load balancing. Antenna pattern update mechanism is further investigated with moving users. Combining network densi fication with cloud computing technologies, cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has been proposed as the emerging 5G network architecture consisting of baseband unit (BBU) pool, remote radio heads (RRHs) and fronthaul links. With cloud based information sharing through the BBU pool, a joint resource block and power allocation scheme is proposed to maximise the number of satisfi ed users whose required QoS is achieved. In this scenario, users are served by high power nodes only. With spatial reuse of system bandwidth by network densi fication, users' QoS provisioning can be ensured but it introduces energy and operating effciency issue. Therefore two network energy optimisation schemes with QoS guarantee are further studied for C-RANs: an energy-effective network deployment scheme is designed for C-RAN based small cells; a joint RRH selection and user association scheme is investigated in heterogeneous C-RAN. Thorough theoretical analysis is conducted in the development of all proposed algorithms, and the effectiveness of all proposed algorithms is validated via comprehensive simulations.China Scholarship Counci