9,562 research outputs found
Scalable RAN Virtualization in Multi-Tenant LTE-A Heterogeneous Networks (Extended version)
Cellular communications are evolving to facilitate the current and expected
increasing needs of Quality of Service (QoS), high data rates and diversity of
offered services. Towards this direction, Radio Access Network (RAN)
virtualization aims at providing solutions of mapping virtual network elements
onto radio resources of the existing physical network. This paper proposes the
Resources nEgotiation for NEtwork Virtualization (RENEV) algorithm, suitable
for application in Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) in Long Term
Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) environments, consisting of a macro evolved NodeB
(eNB) overlaid with small cells. By exploiting Radio Resource Management (RRM)
principles, RENEV achieves slicing and on demand delivery of resources.
Leveraging the multi-tenancy approach, radio resources are transferred in terms
of physical radio Resource Blocks (RBs) among multiple heterogeneous base
stations, interconnected via the X2 interface. The main target is to deal with
traffic variations in geographical dimension. All signaling design
considerations under the current Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
LTE-A architecture are also investigated. Analytical studies and simulation
experiments are conducted to evaluate RENEV in terms of network's throughput as
well as its additional signaling overhead. Moreover we show that RENEV can be
applied independently on top of already proposed schemes for RAN virtualization
to improve their performance. The results indicate that significant merits are
achieved both from network's and users' perspective as well as that it is a
scalable solution for different number of small cells.Comment: 40 pages (including Appendices), Accepted for publication in the IEEE
Transactions on Vehicular Technolog
Resource and Mobility Management in the Network Layer of 5G Cellular Ultra-Dense Networks
© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. PermissĂon from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertisĂng or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.[EN] The provision of very high capacity is one of the big challenges of the 5G cellular technology. This challenge will not be met using traditional approaches like increasing spectral efficiency and bandwidth, as witnessed in previous technology generations. Cell densification will play a major role thanks to its ability to increase the spatial reuse of the available resources. However, this solution is accompanied by some additional management challenges. In this article, we analyze and present the most promising solutions identified in the METIS project for the most relevant network layer challenges of cell densification: resource, interference and mobility management.This work was performed in the framework of the FP7 project ICT-317669 METIS, which is partly funded by the European Union. The authors would like to acknowledge the contributions of their colleagues in METIS, although the views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the project.Calabuig Soler, D.; Barmpounakis, S.; GimĂ©nez Colás, S.; Kousaridas, A.; Lakshmana, TR.; Lorca, J.; Lunden, P.... (2017). Resource and Mobility Management in the Network Layer of 5G Cellular Ultra-Dense Networks. IEEE Communications Magazine. 55(6):162-169. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCOM.2017.1600293S16216955
Statistical QoS Analysis of Full Duplex and Half Duplex Heterogeneous Cellular Networks
In this paper, statistical Quality of Service provisioning in next generation
heterogeneous mobile cellular networks is investigated. To this aim, any active
entity of the cellular network is regarded as a queuing system, whose
statistical QoS requirements depend on the specific application. In this
context, by quantifying the performance in terms of effective capacity, we
introduce a lower bound for the system performance that facilitates an
efficient analysis. We exploit this analytical framework to give insights about
the possible improvement of the statistical QoS experienced by the users if the
current heterogeneous cellular network architecture migrates from a Half Duplex
to a Full Duplex mode of operation. Numerical results and analysis are
provided, where the network is modeled as a Mat\'ern point processes with a
hard core distance. The results demonstrate the accuracy and computational
efficiency of the proposed scheme, especially in large scale wireless systems
TACT: A Transfer Actor-Critic Learning Framework for Energy Saving in Cellular Radio Access Networks
Recent works have validated the possibility of improving energy efficiency in
radio access networks (RANs), achieved by dynamically turning on/off some base
stations (BSs). In this paper, we extend the research over BS switching
operations, which should match up with traffic load variations. Instead of
depending on the dynamic traffic loads which are still quite challenging to
precisely forecast, we firstly formulate the traffic variations as a Markov
decision process. Afterwards, in order to foresightedly minimize the energy
consumption of RANs, we design a reinforcement learning framework based BS
switching operation scheme. Furthermore, to avoid the underlying curse of
dimensionality in reinforcement learning, a transfer actor-critic algorithm
(TACT), which utilizes the transferred learning expertise in historical periods
or neighboring regions, is proposed and provably converges. In the end, we
evaluate our proposed scheme by extensive simulations under various practical
configurations and show that the proposed TACT algorithm contributes to a
performance jumpstart and demonstrates the feasibility of significant energy
efficiency improvement at the expense of tolerable delay performance.Comment: 11 figures, 30 pages, accepted in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications 2014. IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., Feb. 201
Interference management for co-channel mobile femtocells technology in LTE networks
The dense deployment of Femtocells within the Macrocell's coverage is expected to dominate the future of Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks. While Mobile Femtocells (Mobile-Femtos) could be the solution for vehicular networks when there is a need to improve the vehicular User Equipment (UE) performance by mitigating the impact of penetration loss and path-loss issues. The deployed Femtocells have operated in a co-channel deployment due to the scarcity of spectrums. This issue causes interference between Femtocells and Macrocells as well it causes extra overhead on the LTE networks because of the co-tire interference between adjacent Femtocells. In this paper two interference scenarios are considered, the interference between Mobile-Femto and Macrocell, and the interference between the Mobile Femtos themselves. Therefore, to avoid the generated interference between Femtocells, the controlled transmission powers as well as the coverage planning techniques have been discussed. While in the worst-case scenarios, a frequency reuse scheme has been proposed to avoid the generated interference effectively and dynamically between the Mobile-Femtos as well as their UEs and between the Macrocell UEs
Future RAN architecture: SD-RAN through a general-purpose processing platform
In this article, we identify and study the potential of an integrated deployment solution for energy-efficient cellular networks combining the strengths of two very active current research themes: 1) software-defined radio access networks (SD-RANs) and 2) decoupled signaling and data transmissions, or beyond cellular green generation (BCG2) architecture, for enhanced energy efficiency. While SD-RAN envisions a decoupled centralized control plane and data-forwarding plane for flexible control, the BCG2 architecture calls for decoupling coverage from the capacity and coverage provided through an always-on low-power signaling node for a larger geographical area; the capacity is catered by various on-demand data nodes for maximum energy efficiency. In this article, we show that a combined approach that brings both specifications together can not only achieve greater benefits but also facilitate faster realization of both technologies. We propose the idea and design of a signaling controller that acts as a signaling node to provide always-on coverage, consuming low power, and at the same time host the control plane functions for the SDRAN through a general-purpose processing platform. The phantom cell concept is also a similar idea where a normal macrocell provides interference control to densely deployed small cells, although our initial results show that the integrated architecture has a much greater potential for energy savings than phantom cells
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