15,061 research outputs found
Understanding Mobile Traffic Patterns of Large Scale Cellular Towers in Urban Environment
Understanding mobile traffic patterns of large scale cellular towers in urban
environment is extremely valuable for Internet service providers, mobile users,
and government managers of modern metropolis. This paper aims at extracting and
modeling the traffic patterns of large scale towers deployed in a metropolitan
city. To achieve this goal, we need to address several challenges, including
lack of appropriate tools for processing large scale traffic measurement data,
unknown traffic patterns, as well as handling complicated factors of urban
ecology and human behaviors that affect traffic patterns. Our core contribution
is a powerful model which combines three dimensional information (time,
locations of towers, and traffic frequency spectrum) to extract and model the
traffic patterns of thousands of cellular towers. Our empirical analysis
reveals the following important observations. First, only five basic
time-domain traffic patterns exist among the 9,600 cellular towers. Second,
each of the extracted traffic pattern maps to one type of geographical
locations related to urban ecology, including residential area, business
district, transport, entertainment, and comprehensive area. Third, our
frequency-domain traffic spectrum analysis suggests that the traffic of any
tower among the 9,600 can be constructed using a linear combination of four
primary components corresponding to human activity behaviors. We believe that
the proposed traffic patterns extraction and modeling methodology, combined
with the empirical analysis on the mobile traffic, pave the way toward a deep
understanding of the traffic patterns of large scale cellular towers in modern
metropolis.Comment: To appear at IMC 201
Hybrid Satellite-Terrestrial Communication Networks for the Maritime Internet of Things: Key Technologies, Opportunities, and Challenges
With the rapid development of marine activities, there has been an increasing
number of maritime mobile terminals, as well as a growing demand for high-speed
and ultra-reliable maritime communications to keep them connected.
Traditionally, the maritime Internet of Things (IoT) is enabled by maritime
satellites. However, satellites are seriously restricted by their high latency
and relatively low data rate. As an alternative, shore & island-based base
stations (BSs) can be built to extend the coverage of terrestrial networks
using fourth-generation (4G), fifth-generation (5G), and beyond 5G services.
Unmanned aerial vehicles can also be exploited to serve as aerial maritime BSs.
Despite of all these approaches, there are still open issues for an efficient
maritime communication network (MCN). For example, due to the complicated
electromagnetic propagation environment, the limited geometrically available BS
sites, and rigorous service demands from mission-critical applications,
conventional communication and networking theories and methods should be
tailored for maritime scenarios. Towards this end, we provide a survey on the
demand for maritime communications, the state-of-the-art MCNs, and key
technologies for enhancing transmission efficiency, extending network coverage,
and provisioning maritime-specific services. Future challenges in developing an
environment-aware, service-driven, and integrated satellite-air-ground MCN to
be smart enough to utilize external auxiliary information, e.g., sea state and
atmosphere conditions, are also discussed
Big Data Meets Telcos: A Proactive Caching Perspective
Mobile cellular networks are becoming increasingly complex to manage while
classical deployment/optimization techniques and current solutions (i.e., cell
densification, acquiring more spectrum, etc.) are cost-ineffective and thus
seen as stopgaps. This calls for development of novel approaches that leverage
recent advances in storage/memory, context-awareness, edge/cloud computing, and
falls into framework of big data. However, the big data by itself is yet
another complex phenomena to handle and comes with its notorious 4V: velocity,
voracity, volume and variety. In this work, we address these issues in
optimization of 5G wireless networks via the notion of proactive caching at the
base stations. In particular, we investigate the gains of proactive caching in
terms of backhaul offloadings and request satisfactions, while tackling the
large-amount of available data for content popularity estimation. In order to
estimate the content popularity, we first collect users' mobile traffic data
from a Turkish telecom operator from several base stations in hours of time
interval. Then, an analysis is carried out locally on a big data platform and
the gains of proactive caching at the base stations are investigated via
numerical simulations. It turns out that several gains are possible depending
on the level of available information and storage size. For instance, with 10%
of content ratings and 15.4 Gbyte of storage size (87% of total catalog size),
proactive caching achieves 100% of request satisfaction and offloads 98% of the
backhaul when considering 16 base stations.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
Why It Takes So Long to Connect to a WiFi Access Point
Today's WiFi networks deliver a large fraction of traffic. However, the
performance and quality of WiFi networks are still far from satisfactory. Among
many popular quality metrics (throughput, latency), the probability of
successfully connecting to WiFi APs and the time cost of the WiFi connection
set-up process are the two of the most critical metrics that affect WiFi users'
experience. To understand the WiFi connection set-up process in real-world
settings, we carry out measurement studies on million mobile users from
representative cities associating with million APs in billion WiFi
sessions, collected from a mobile "WiFi Manager" App that tops the Android/iOS
App market. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to do such large
scale study on: how large the WiFi connection set-up time cost is, what factors
affect the WiFi connection set-up process, and what can be done to reduce the
WiFi connection set-up time cost. Based on the measurement analysis, we develop
a machine learning based AP selection strategy that can significantly improve
WiFi connection set-up performance, against the conventional strategy purely
based on signal strength, by reducing the connection set-up failures from
to and reducing time costs of the connection set-up
processes by more than times.Comment: 11pages, conferenc
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