Dynamic Pricing in Heterogeneous Wireless Cellular Networks

Smart communications devices are giving users instant access to applications that consume large amounts of data. These applications have different requirements on the network for delivery of data. In order to support these different applications, operators are required to support multiple service classes. Given the regulatory and technology constraints and the relatively high cost associated with wireless spectrum licensing and utilization, demand will exceed supply leading to congestion and overload conditions. In addition to new broadband radio technologies offering higher data rates, operators are looking at deploying alternate heterogeneous technologies, such as WLAN, to provide additional bandwidth for serving customers. It is expected that this will still fall short of providing enough network resources to meet the ITU requirement for 1% new call blocking probability. An economic mechanism that offers incentives to individuals for rational behavior is required in order in order to reduce the demand for network resources and resolve the congestion problem. The research in this dissertation demonstrates that the integration of a dynamic pricing with connection admission control mechanism for an operator deploying cooperative heterogeneous networks (e.g., LTE and WLAN) offering multiple QoS service classes reduces the new call blocking probability to the required 1% level. The experimental design consisted, first, of an analytical model of the CAC algorithm with dynamic pricing in a heterogeneous environment. The analytical model was subsequently validated through discrete-event simulation using Matlab

Base Station controlled load balancing with handovers in Mobile WiMAX

Tämän diplomityön päätavoitteena on tutkia, kuinka kuorman tasaus voidaan suorittaa tukiaseman aloitteesta yhteysvastuun vaihdoilla mobiili WiMAX:ssa ja selvittää menetelmän potentiaalia edistää resurssien käyttöä sekä palvelun laatua koko systeemissä. Tavoitteena on myös tutkia alustavasti sitä, miten turvakaistoja voitaisiin varata ns. pelastavalle yhteysvastuun vaihdolle mobiili WiMAX:ssa, kuinka tämä vaikuttaisi kuorman tasaukseen ja kuinka nämä lähestymistavat voitaisiin yhdistää. Diplomityö sisältää koosteen IEEE 802.16e radiorajapintateknologian ja WiMAX Forum liityntäverkkoarkkitehtuurin tärkeimmistä elementeistä kuorman tasauksen ja yhteysvastuun vaihdon suhteen sekä kirjallisuuskatsauksen kuorman tasauksesta, sekä pelastavan yhteysvastuun vaihdon ja liikenteen priorisoinnista. Näiden perusteella suunniteltiin mobiili WiMAX:lle räätälöity resurssien käyttöön perustuva peruskuormantasausalgoritmi. Tämän lisäksi tehtiin muutama alustava ehdotus perusalgoritmia edistävistä menetelmistä. Näihin kuuluivat esimerkiksi kuorman tasauksen laukaisuun tarkoitetun kynnyksen automaattinen säätäminen, useiden kynnysten käyttäminen sekä resurssien varaukseen perustuva laukaisu, missä kuorman tasaus voidaan laukaista turvakaistojen suhteen. Lopuksi perusalgoritmi evaluoitiin staattisessa ympäristössä. Vaikka suoritetut simulaatiot eivät olleet laajamittaisia, perusalgoritmin parametreista ja yleisestä suorituskyvystä saatiin hyödyllistä informaatiota. Vaikka algoritmi suoriutui hyvin simuloidussa ympäristössä, aikaisemmin suunnitelluille edistäville menetelmille todettiin yleisesti ottaen selvä tarve. Tämän diplomityön pitäisi luoda hyvä pohja yhteysvastuun vaihtoon perustuvan kuorman tasauksen edelleen kehittämiselle ja evaluoinnille mobiili WiMAX:ssa. Tutkimuksen perusteella päädyttiin siihen johtopäätökseen, että kuorman tasaus yhteysvastuun vaihdolla voi olla todella tehokas tapa vapauttaa resursseja suurimmassa osassa ympäristöistä, mutta että turvakaistojen käyttöä tulisi silti harkita.The purpose of this thesis is to examine how load balancing with Base Station initiated directed handovers could be conducted in Mobile WiMAX and the potential it has to enhance Resource Utilization and QoS system wide. An additional goal of the thesis is also to conduct preliminary research on how guard bands for rescue handovers could be used in Mobile WiMAX, how this would affect load balancing and how these two approaches could be combined. The thesis includes a background study on the key system aspects of the IEEE 802.16e radio interface technology and WiMAX Forum Access Network Architecture in terms of load balancing and handovers and a literary review on load balancing, and system wide handover and traffic prioritization. Based on the gained knowledge a basic Resource Utilization based load balancing algorithm tailored for Mobile WiMAX is designed. Few preliminary enhancement proposals are also made in terms of e.g. automatic tuning of the triggering threshold, multiple threshold based triggering and Resource Reservation based triggering where load balancing can be triggered in relations to the reserved guard for rescue handovers and higher priority traffic. Finally preliminary evaluation of the basic algorithm in a static environment is conducted. Although the simulations are not extensive, beneficial information is obtained of the basic parameters of the algorithm and of the overall performance of the algorithm. Even though the basic algorithm performed well in the simulated environment, a clear need was recognized for the enhancements introduced earlier. All in all this thesis should form a very good basis for the further development and evaluation of handover based load balancing in Mobile WiMAX. Based on the study it was concluded that load balancing with directed handovers can be a very efficient way to release resources in most cases but the use of rescue handover guard bands should still be considered

Efficient Algorithms and Framework for Bandwidth Allocation, Quality-of-Service Provisioning and Location Management in Mobile Wireless Computing

The fusion of computers and communications has promised to herald the age of information super-highway over high speed communication networks where the ultimate goal is to enable a multitude of users at any place, access information from anywhere and at any time. This, in a nutshell, is the goal envisioned by the Personal Communication Services (PCS) and Xerox's ubiquitous computing. In view of the remarkable growth of the mobile communication users in the last few years, the radio frequency spectrum allocated by the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) to this service is still very limited and the usable bandwidth is by far much less than the expected demand, particularly in view of the emergence of the next generation wireless multimedia applications like video-on-demand, WWW browsing, traveler information systems etc. Proper management of available spectrum is necessary not only to accommodate these high bandwidth applications, but also to alleviate problems due to sudden explosion of traffic in so called hot cells. In this dissertation, we have developed simple load balancing techniques to cope with the problem of tele-traffic overloads in one or more hot cells in the system. The objective is to ease out the high channel demand in hot cells by borrowing channels from suitable cold cells and by proper assignment (or, re-assignment) of the channels among the users. We also investigate possible ways of improving system capacity by rescheduling bandwidth in case of wireless multimedia traffic. In our proposed scheme, traffic using multiple channels releases one or more channels to increase the carried traffic or throughput in the system. Two orthogonal QoS parameters, called carried traffic and bandwidth degradation, are identified and a cost function describing the total revenue earned by the system from a bandwidth degradation and call admission policy, is formulated. A channel sharing scheme is proposed for co-existing real-time and non-real-time traffic and analyzed using a Markov modulated Poisson process (MMPP) based queueing model. The location management problem in mobile computing deals with the problem of a combined management of location updates and paging in the network, both of which consume scarce network resources like bandwidth, CPU cycles etc. An easily implementable location update scheme is developed which considers per-user mobility pattern on top of the conventional location area based approach and computes an update strategy for each user by minimizing the average location management cost. The cost optimization problem is elegantly solved using a genetic algorithm

A source-destination based dynamic pricing scheme to optimize resource utilization in heterogeneous wireless networks

Mobile wireless resources demand is rapidly growing due to the proliferation of bandwidth-hungry mobile devices and applications. This has resulted in congestion in mobile wireless networks (MWN) especially during the peak hours when user traffic can be as high as tenfold the average traffic. Mobile network operators (MNOs) have been trying to solve this problem in various ways. First, MNOs have tried to expand the network capacity but have still been unable to meet the peak hour demand. Focus has then shifted to economic and behavioral mechanisms. The widely used of these economic mechanisms is dynamic pricing which varies the MWN resources' price according to the congestion level in the MWN. This encourages users to shift their non-critical traffic from the busy hour, when the MWN is congested, to off-peak hours when the network is under-utilized. As a result, congestion of the MWN during the peak hours is reduced. At the same time, the MWN utilization during the off-peak hours is also increased. The current dynamic pricing schemes, however, only consider the congestion level in the call-originating cell and neglect the call-destination cell when computing the dynamic price. Due to this feature, we refer the current dynamic pricing schemes as source–based dynamic pricing (SDP) schemes in this work. The main problem with these schemes is that, when the majority of the users in a congested cell are callees, dynamic pricing is ineffective because callers and not callees pay for network services, and resources used by callers and callees are the same for symmetric services. For example, application of dynamic pricing does not deter a callee located in a congested cell from receiving a call, which originates from a caller located in an uncongested cell. Also, when the distribution of prospective callees is higher than that of callers in an underutilized cell, SDP schemes are ineffective as callees do not pay for a call and therefore low discounts do not entice them to increase utilization. In this distribution, dynamic pricing entices prospective callers to make calls but since their distribution is low, the MWN resource utilization does not increase by any significant margin. To address these problems, we have developed a source-destination based dynamic pricing (SDBDP) scheme, which considers congestion levels in both the call-originating and calldestination cells to compute the dynamic price to be paid by a caller. This SDBDP scheme is integrated with a load-based joint call admission control (JCAC) algorithm for admitting incoming service requests in to the least utilized radio access technology (RAT). The load-based JCAC algorithm achieves uniform traffic distribution in the heterogeneous wireless network (HWN). To test the SDBDP scheme, we have developed an analytical model based on M/M/m/m queuing model. New or handoff service requests, arriving when all the RATs in the HWN are fully utilized, lead to call blocking for new calls and call dropping for handoff calls. The call blocking probability, call dropping probability and percentage MWN utilization are used as the performance metrics in evaluating the SDBDP scheme. An exponential demand model is used to approximate the users' response to the presented dynamic price. The exponential demand model captures both the price elasticity of demand and the demand shift constant for different users. The matrix laboratory (MATLAB) tool has been used to carry out the numerical simulations. An evaluation scenario consisting of four groups of co-located cells each with three RATs is used. Both SDP and the developed SDBDP schemes have been subjected under the evaluation scenario. Simulation results show that the developed SDBDP scheme reduces both the new call blocking and handoff call dropping probabilities during the peak hours, for all callercallee distributions. On the other hand, the current SDP scheme only reduces new call blocking and handoff call dropping probabilities only under some caller –callee distributions (When the callers were the majority in the HWN). Also, the SDBDP scheme increases the percentage MWN utilization during the off-peak for all the caller-callee distributions in the HWN. On the other hand, the SDP scheme is found to increase the percentage MWN utilization only when the distribution of callers is higher than that of callees in the HWN. From analyzing the simulations results, we conclude that the SDBDP scheme achieves better congestion control and MWN resource utilization than the existing SDP schemes, under arbitrary caller-callee distribution

Quality of service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless LANs

Delivering multimedia content to heterogeneous devices over a variable networking environment while maintaining high quality levels involves many technical challenges. The research reported in this thesis presents a solution for Quality of Service (QoS)-based service differentiation when delivering multimedia content over the wireless LANs. This thesis has three major contributions outlined below: 1. A Model-based Bandwidth Estimation algorithm (MBE), which estimates the available bandwidth based on novel TCP and UDP throughput models over IEEE 802.11 WLANs. MBE has been modelled, implemented, and tested through simulations and real life testing. In comparison with other bandwidth estimation techniques, MBE shows better performance in terms of error rate, overhead, and loss. 2. An intelligent Prioritized Adaptive Scheme (iPAS), which provides QoS service differentiation for multimedia delivery in wireless networks. iPAS assigns dynamic priorities to various streams and determines their bandwidth share by employing a probabilistic approach-which makes use of stereotypes. The total bandwidth to be allocated is estimated using MBE. The priority level of individual stream is variable and dependent on stream-related characteristics and delivery QoS parameters. iPAS can be deployed seamlessly over the original IEEE 802.11 protocols and can be included in the IEEE 802.21 framework in order to optimize the control signal communication. iPAS has been modelled, implemented, and evaluated via simulations. The results demonstrate that iPAS achieves better performance than the equal channel access mechanism over IEEE 802.11 DCF and a service differentiation scheme on top of IEEE 802.11e EDCA, in terms of fairness, throughput, delay, loss, and estimated PSNR. Additionally, both objective and subjective video quality assessment have been performed using a prototype system. 3. A QoS-based Downlink/Uplink Fairness Scheme, which uses the stereotypes-based structure to balance the QoS parameters (i.e. throughput, delay, and loss) between downlink and uplink VoIP traffic. The proposed scheme has been modelled and tested through simulations. The results show that, in comparison with other downlink/uplink fairness-oriented solutions, the proposed scheme performs better in terms of VoIP capacity and fairness level between downlink and uplink traffic

Final report on the evaluation of RRM/CRRM algorithms

Deliverable public del projecte EVERESTThis deliverable provides a definition and a complete evaluation of the RRM/CRRM algorithms selected in D11 and D15, and evolved and refined on an iterative process. The evaluation will be carried out by means of simulations using the simulators provided at D07, and D14.Preprin

Cooperative control of relay based cellular networks

PhDThe increasing popularity of wireless communications and the higher data requirements of new types of service lead to higher demands on wireless networks. Relay based cellular networks have been seen as an effective way to meet users’ increased data rate requirements while still retaining the benefits of a cellular structure. However, maximizing the probability of providing service and spectrum efficiency are still major challenges for network operators and engineers because of the heterogeneous traffic demands, hard-to-predict user movements and complex traffic models. In a mobile network, load balancing is recognised as an efficient way to increase the utilization of limited frequency spectrum at reasonable costs. Cooperative control based on geographic load balancing is employed to provide flexibility for relay based cellular networks and to respond to changes in the environment. According to the potential capability of existing antenna systems, adaptive radio frequency domain control in the physical layer is explored to provide coverage at the right place at the right time. This thesis proposes several effective and efficient approaches to improve spectrum efficiency using network wide optimization to coordinate the coverage offered by different network components according to the antenna models and relay station capability. The approaches include tilting of antenna sectors, changing the power of omni-directional antennas, and changing the assignment of relay stations to different base stations. Experiments show that the proposed approaches offer significant improvements and robustness in heterogeneous traffic scenarios and when the propagation environment changes. The issue of predicting the consequence of cooperative decisions regarding antenna configurations when applied in a realistic environment is described, and a coverage prediction model is proposed. The consequences of applying changes to the antenna configuration on handovers are analysed in detail. The performance evaluations are based on a system level simulator in the context of Mobile WiMAX technology, but the concepts apply more generally

Quality-Oriented Mobility Management for Multimedia Content Delivery to Mobile Users

The heterogeneous wireless networking environment determined by the latest developments in wireless access technologies promises a high level of communication resources for mobile computational devices. Although the communication resources provided, especially referring to bandwidth, enable multimedia streaming to mobile users, maintaining a high user perceived quality is still a challenging task. The main factors which affect quality in multimedia streaming over wireless networks are mainly the error-prone nature of the wireless channels and the user mobility. These factors determine a high level of dynamics of wireless communication resources, namely variations in throughput and packet loss as well as network availability and delays in delivering the data packets. Under these conditions maintaining a high level of quality, as perceived by the user, requires a quality oriented mobility management scheme. Consequently we propose the Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm, a novel quality oriented handover management scheme which unlike other similar solutions, smoothly transfer the data traffic from one network to another using multiple simultaneous connections. To estimate the capacity of each connection the novel Quality of Multimedia Streaming (QMS) metric is proposed. The QMS metric aims at offering maximum flexibility and efficiency allowing the applications to fine tune the behavior of the handover algorithm. The current simulation-based performance evaluation clearly shows the better performance of the proposed Smooth Adaptive Soft-Handover Algorithm as compared with other handover solutions. The evaluation was performed in various scenarios including multiple mobile hosts performing handover simultaneously, wireless networks with variable overlapping areas, and various network congestion levels

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