Challenges Imposed by User's Mobility in Future HetNet: Offloading and Mobility Management

The users' mobility imposes challenges to mobility management and, the offloading process, which hinder the conventional heterogeneous networks (HetNets) in meeting the huge data traffic requirements of the future. In this thesis, a trio-connectivity (TC), which includes a control-plane (C-plane), a user-plane (U-plane) and an indication-plane (I-plane), is proposed to tackle these challenges. Especially, the I-plane is created as an indicator to help the user equipment (UE) identify and discover the small cells in the system prior to offloading her from the overloaded cells e.g. macro cells, to the cells with abundant resources e.g. small cells. In order to show the advantages of the proposed TC structure, a comparison between the TC and the dual-connectivity (DC) is presented in this thesis, in terms of uplink energy efficiency (ULEE) and energy consumption. Furthermore, the complexity of mobility management is addressed in this thesis as the HetNets will have to handle a large number of UEs and their frequent handoffs due to very dense small-footprint small cells. Considering an accurate mobility framework is essential not only to find the potential offloading to the small cells but also to show the mobility impact on the quality of service (QoS). This thesis presents a framework to model and derive the coverage of small cells, the cell sojourn time and the handoff rate in a multi-tier HetNet by taking into account the overlap coverage among the small cells. The results show the effects of a number of parameters, including the density and the transmit power of the small cells and the power control factor, on the system performance. They also show that the TC can outperform the DC in dense HetNets in terms of energy efficiency and energy consumption

The Optimum Rate of Inter-Frequency Scan in Inter-Frequency HetNets

Inter-frequency scan (IFS) is a process carried out by the terminals to discover the small cells (SCs) in the interfrequency heterogeneous networks (HetNets) prior to offload them to the discovered SCs. The IFS has a great impact on the quality of service, the energy efficiency and the spectral efficiency in the cellular systems. In this paper, a framework is presented to model and evaluate the impact of IFS on the system performance by using the stochastic geometry. The energy efficiency is derived as performance metric to obtain the optimum value of the IFS rate (optimum number of scans per unit time) by taking into consideration the trade-off in the offloading process between the power consumption and exploiting the system resources efficiently. Considering the energy consumption for performing IFSs along with the energy consumption for maintaining the uplink transmission will help to find the optimum value of IFS rate that achieves the best energy efficiency. The analysis and results show that the optimum IFS rate depends on different system parameters such as SCs’ density, terminal’s speed and the transmit power of the SCs (SCs’ coverage)

Hybrid Digital-to-Analog Beamforming for Millimeter-Wave Systems with High User Density

Millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) systems with hybrid digital-to-analog beamforming (D-A BF) have the potential to fulfill 5G traffic demands. The capacity of mmWave systems is severely limited as each radio frequency (RF) transceiver chain in current base station (BS) architectures support only a particular user. In order to overcome this problem when high density of users are present, a new algorithm is proposed in this paper. This algorithm operates on the principle of selection combining (SC). This algorithm is compared with the state of the art hybrid D-A BF. The simulation results show that our proposed hybrid D-A BF using SC supports higher density of users per RF chain. Furthermore, our proposed algorithm achieves higher capacity than what is achieved by the current hybrid D-A BF systems