Mobility and Handoff Management in Wireless Networks

With the increasing demands for new data and real-time services, wireless networks should support calls with different traffic characteristics and different Quality of Service (QoS)guarantees. In addition, various wireless technologies and networks exist currently that can satisfy different needs and requirements of mobile users. Since these different wireless networks act as complementary to each other in terms of their capabilities and suitability for different applications, integration of these networks will enable the mobile users to be always connected to the best available access network depending on their requirements. This integration of heterogeneous networks will, however, lead to heterogeneities in access technologies and network protocols. To meet the requirements of mobile users under this heterogeneous environment, a common infrastructure to interconnect multiple access networks will be needed. In this chapter, the design issues of a number of mobility management schemes have been presented. Each of these schemes utilizes IP-based technologies to enable efficient roaming in heterogeneous network. Efficient handoff mechanisms are essential for ensuring seamless connectivity and uninterrupted service delivery. A number of handoff schemes in a heterogeneous networking environment are also presented in this chapter.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figure

Mobility management in 5G heterogeneous networks

In recent years, mobile data traffic has increased exponentially as a result of widespread popularity and uptake of portable devices, such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. This growth has placed enormous stress on network service providers who are committed to offering the best quality of service to consumer groups. Consequently, telecommunication engineers are investigating innovative solutions to accommodate the additional load offered by growing numbers of mobile users. The fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication standard is expected to provide numerous innovative solutions to meet the growing demand of consumer groups. Accordingly the ultimate goal is to achieve several key technological milestones including up to 1000 times higher wireless area capacity and a significant cut in power consumption. Massive deployment of small cells is likely to be a key innovation in 5G, which enables frequent frequency reuse and higher data rates. Small cells, however, present a major challenge for nodes moving at vehicular speeds. This is because the smaller coverage areas of small cells result in frequent handover, which leads to lower throughput and longer delay. In this thesis, a new mobility management technique is introduced that reduces the number of handovers in a 5G heterogeneous network. This research also investigates techniques to accommodate low latency applications in nodes moving at vehicular speeds

Modelling and Analysis of Resource Management Schemes in Wireless Networks. Analytical Models and Performance Evaluation of Handoff Schemes and Resource Re-Allocation in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Wireless Cellular Networks.

Over recent years, wireless communication systems have been experiencing a dramatic and continuous growth in the number of subscribers, thus placing extra demands on system capacity. At the same time, keeping Quality of Service (QoS) at an acceptable level is a critical concern and a challenge to the wireless network designer. In this sense, performance analysis must be the first step in designing or improving a network. Thus, powerful mathematical tools for analysing most of the performance metrics in the network are required. A good modelling and analysis of the wireless cellular networks will lead to a high level of QoS. In this thesis, different analytical models of various handoff schemes and resource re-allocation in homogeneous and heterogeneous wireless cellular networks are developed and investigated. The sustained increase in users and the request for advanced services are some of the key motivations for considering the designing of Hierarchical Cellular Networks (HCN). In this type of system, calls can be blocked in a microcell flow over to an overlay macrocell. Microcells in the HCN can be replaced by WLANs as this can provide high bandwidth and its users have limited mobility features. Efficient sharing of resources between wireless cellular networks and WLANs will improve the capacity as well as QoS metrics. This thesis first presents an analytical model for priority handoff mechanisms, where new calls and handoff calls are captured by two different traffic arrival processes, respectively. Using this analytical model, the optimised number of channels assigned to II handover calls, with the aim of minimising the drop probability under given network scenarios, has been investigated. Also, an analytical model of a network containing two cells has been developed to measure the different performance parameters for each of the cells in the network, as well as altogether as one network system. Secondly, a new solution is proposed to manage the bandwidth and re-allocate it in a proper way to maintain the QoS for all types of calls. Thirdly, performance models for microcells and macrocells in hierarchical cellular networks have been developed by using a combination of different handoff schemes. Finally, the microcell in HCN is replaced by WLANs and a prioritised vertical handoff scheme in an integrated UMTS/WLAN network has been developed. Simulation experiments have been conducted to validate the accuracy of these analytical models. The models have then been used to investigate the performance of the networks under different scenarios

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

Development of resource allocation strategies based on cognitive radio

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Efficient and Virtualized Scheduling for OFDM-Based High Mobility Wireless Communications Objects

Services providers (SPs) in the radio platform technology standard long term evolution (LTE) systems are enduring many challenges in order to accommodate the rapid expansion of mobile data usage. The modern technologies demonstrate new challenges to SPs, for example, reducing the cost of the capital and operating expenditures while supporting high data throughput per customer, extending battery life-per-charge of the cell phone devices, and supporting high mobility communications with fast and seamless handover (HO) networking architecture. In this thesis, a variety of optimized techniques aimed at providing innovative solutions for such challenges are explored. The thesis is divided into three parts. The first part outlines the benefits and challenges of deploying virtualized resource sharing concept. Wherein, SPs achieving a different schedulers policy are sharing evolved network B, allowing SPs to customize their efforts and provide service requirements; as a promising solution for reducing operational and capital expenditures, leading to potential energy savings, and supporting higher peak rates. The second part, formulates the optimized power allocation problem in a virtualized scheme in LTE uplink systems, aiming to extend the mobile devices’ battery utilization time per charge. While, the third part extrapolates a proposed hybrid-HO (HY-HO) technique, that can enhance the system performance in terms of latency and HO reliability at cell boundary for high mobility objects (up to 350 km/hr; wherein, HO will occur more frequent). The main contributions of this thesis are in designing optimal binary integer programmingbased and suboptimal heuristic (with complexity reduction) scheduling algorithms subject to exclusive and contiguous allocation, maximum transmission power, and rate constraints. Moreover, designing the HY-HO based on the combination of soft and hard HO was able to enhance the system performance in term of latency, interruption time and reliability during HO. The results prove that the proposed solutions effectively contribute in addressing the challenges caused by the demand for high data rates and power transmission in mobile networks especially in virtualized resources sharing scenarios that can support high data rates with improving quality of services (QoSs)

3G migration in Pakistan

The telecommunication industry in Pakistan has come a long way since the country\u27s independence in 1947. The initial era could be fairly termed as the PTCL (Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited) monopoly, for it was the sole provider of all telecommunication services across the country. It was not until four decades later that the region embarked into the new world of wireless communication, hence ending the decades old PTCL monopoly. By the end of the late 1990\u27s, government support and international investment in the region opened new doors to innovation and better quality, low cost, healthy competition. Wireless licenses for the private sector in the telecommunication industry triggered a promising chain of events that resulted in a drastic change in the telecommunication infrastructure and service profile. The newly introduced wireless (GSM) technology received enormous support from all stakeholders (consumers, regulatory body, and market) and caused a vital boost in Pakistan\u27s economy. Numerous tangential elements had triggered this vital move in the history of telecommunications in Pakistan. Entrepreneurs intended to test the idea of global joint ventures in the East and hence the idea of international business became a reality. The technology had proven to be a great success in the West, while Pakistan\u27s telecom consumer had lived under the shadow of PTCL dominance for decades and needed more flexibility. At last the world was moving from wired to wireless! Analysts termed this move as the beginning of a new era. The investors, telecommunication businesses, and Pakistani treasury prospered. It was a win-win situation for all involved. The learning curve was steep for both operators and consumers but certainly improved over time. In essence, the principle of deploying the right technology in the right market at the right time led to this remarkable success. The industry today stands on the brink of a similar crossroads via transition from second generation to something beyond. With the partial success of 3G in Europe and the USA, the government has announced the release of three 3G licenses by mid 2009. This decision is not yet fully supported by all but still initiated parallel efforts by the operators and the vendors to integrate this next move into their existing infrastructure

Performance Evaluation of v-eNodeB using Virtualized Radio Resource Management

With the demand upsurge for high bandwidth services, continuous increase in the number of cellular subscriptions, adoption of Internet of Things (IoT), and marked growth in Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic, there is great stress exerted on cellular network infrastructure. The present wireline and wireless networking technologies are rigid in nature and heavily hardware-dependent, as a result of which the process of infrastructure upgrade to keep up with future demand is cumbersome and expensive. Software-defined networks (SDN) hold the promise to decrease network rigidity by providing central control and flow abstraction, which in current network setups are hardware-based. The embrace of SDN in traditional cellular networks has led to the implementation of vital network functions in the form of software that are deployed in virtualized environments. This approach to move crucial and hardware intensive network functions to virtual environments is collectively referred to as network function virtualization (NFV). Our work evaluates the cost reduction and energy savings that can be achieved by the application of SDN and NFV technologies in cellular networks. In this thesis, we implement a virtualized eNodeB component (Radio Resource Management) to add agility to the network setup and improve performance, which we compare with a traditional resource manager. When combined with dynamic network resource allocation techniques proposed in Elastic Handoff, our hardware agnostic approach can achieve a greater reduction in capital and operational expenses through optimal use of network resources and efficient energy utilization. Advisor: Jitender S. Deogu

MOBILITY SUPPORT ARCHITECTURES FOR NEXT-GENERATION WIRELESS NETWORKS

With the convergence of the wireless networks and the Internet and the booming demand for multimedia applications, the next-generation (beyond the third generation, or B3G) wireless systems are expected to be all IP-based and provide real-time and non-real-time mobile services anywhere and anytime. Powerful and efficient mobility support is thus the key enabler to fulfil such an attractive vision by supporting various mobility scenarios. This thesis contributes to this interesting while challenging topic. After a literature review on mobility support architectures and protocols, the thesis starts presenting our contributions with a generic multi-layer mobility support framework, which provides a general approach to meet the challenges of handling comprehensive mobility issues. The cross-layer design methodology is introduced to coordinate the protocol layers for optimised system design. Particularly, a flexible and efficient cross-layer signalling scheme is proposed for interlayer interactions. The proposed generic framework is then narrowed down with several fundamental building blocks identified to be focused on as follows. As widely adopted, we assume that the IP-based access networks are organised into administrative domains, which are inter-connected through a global IP-based wired core network. For a mobile user who roams from one domain to another, macro (inter-domain) mobility management should be in place for global location tracking and effective handoff support for both real-time and non-real-lime applications. Mobile IP (MIP) and the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) are being adopted as the two dominant standard-based macro-mobility architectures, each of which has mobility entities and messages in its own right. The work explores the joint optimisations and interactions of MIP and SIP when utilising the complementary power of both protocols. Two distinctive integrated MIP-SIP architectures are designed and evaluated, compared with their hybrid alternatives and other approaches. The overall analytical and simulation results shown significant performance improvements in terms of cost-efficiency, among other metrics. Subsequently, for the micro (intra-domain) mobility scenario where a mobile user moves across IP subnets within a domain, a micro mobility management architecture is needed to support fast handoffs and constrain signalling messaging loads incurred by intra-domain movements within the domain. The Hierarchical MIPv6 (HMIPv6) and the Fast Handovers for MIPv6 (FMIPv6) protocols are selected to fulfil the design requirements. The work proposes enhancements to these protocols and combines them in an optimised way. resulting in notably improved performances in contrast to a number of alternative approaches