Proportional Fair RAT Aggregation in HetNets

Heterogeneity in wireless network architectures (i.e., the coexistence of 3G, LTE, 5G, WiFi, etc.) has become a key component of current and future generation cellular networks. Simultaneous aggregation of each client's traffic across multiple such radio access technologies (RATs) / base stations (BSs) can significantly increase the system throughput, and has become an important feature of cellular standards on multi-RAT integration. Distributed algorithms that can realize the full potential of this aggregation are thus of great importance to operators. In this paper, we study the problem of resource allocation for multi-RAT traffic aggregation in HetNets (heterogeneous networks). Our goal is to ensure that the resources at each BS are allocated so that the aggregate throughput achieved by each client across its RATs satisfies a proportional fairness (PF) criterion. In particular, we provide a simple distributed algorithm for resource allocation at each BS that extends the PF allocation algorithm for a single BS. Despite its simplicity and lack of coordination across the BSs, we show that our algorithm converges to the desired PF solution and provide (tight) bounds on its convergence speed. We also study the characteristics of the optimal solution and use its properties to prove the optimality of our algorithm's outcomes.Comment: Extended version of the 31st International Teletraffic Congress (ITC 2019) conference pape

Design and Evaluation of Flow Mapping Systems for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Mobile wireless networks are always challenged by growing application demand. The increasing heterogeneity of both mobile device connection capability and wireless network coverage forms a general heterogeneous wireless network (HetNet). This type of HetNet contains sub-networks of different Radio Access Technologies. How to better coordinate the mappings of flows between Access Points (AP) and User Equipment (UE) inside this type of HetNet to improve system and user-level performance is an interesting research problem. The flow mapping systems used by off-the-shelf mobile devices make policy-based decisions from local information. Several global information based flow mapping systems that use Generalized Proportional Fairness (GPF) as the optimization objectives have been proposed to improve the system-level performance. However, they have not been compared with both the local-policy based approaches and the optimal solution under the same assumptions with variations of system parameters. Therefore, it is still unclear to the community whether it is worthwhile to construct a flow mapping system for HetNets composed by LTE and WiFi networks, even under a simplified assumption of only optimizing throughput related system performance metrics. In this dissertation, we evaluate three types of flow mapping systems: Global Information based Flow Mapping Systems (GIFMS), Local Information based Flow Mapping Systems (LIFMS), and Semi-GIFMS. We evaluate these systems with metrics related to both the spectrum efficiency and flow-level fairness under the following variations of system parameters: 1) topologies of UEs; 2) coverage of APs; 3) number of UEs; 4) number of non-participating UEs; 5) on-off session dynamics; 6) UE mobility. We also discuss options to implement each type of flow mapping systems and any relevant trade-offs. From the evaluations, we find that the currently-in-use WiFi preferred local greedy flow mapping system provides far poorer spectral efficiency and generalized proportional fairness than all the other tested flow mapping systems, including the local greedy flow mapping systems that give LTE and WiFi equal opportunities (local-greedy-equal-chance) in most settings. This finding indicates that the flow mapping system in use has much room for improvement in terms of GPF and aggregate throughput. The performance of local-greedy-equal-chance is close to that of the global and AP-level information based systems under some UE topologies. However, their performance is not as consistent as the global and AP-level based systems when UEs form clusters that produce AP load imbalance. We also derive the incremental evaluations of GPF for both proportional and max-min fair scheduled APs. Based on these derivations, we propose a design for AP-level information based flow mapping system or Semi-GIFMS. It is an event-triggered flow mapping system based on minimum AP-level metrics monitoring and dissemination. From our evaluation and analysis, this flow mapping system performs equivalent to or better than GIFMS in terms of both GPF and aggregate throughput in all the tested scenarios. It also owns the advantages of lower overhead and not requiring an additional scheduling server. We think it is the best choice for the next generation HetNets where APs can be modified to monitor and broadcast the minimum information identified. Furthermore, we find that the number of UEs, number of non-participating UEs, coverage of APs, bandwidth sharing types of APs, on-off session and UE mobility dynamics do not have a major impact on the relative performance difference among various flow mapping systems

Optimal Traffic Splitting Policy in LTE-based Heterogeneous Network

Dual Connectivity (DC) is a technique proposed to address the problem of increased handovers in heterogeneous networks. In DC, a foreground User Equipment (UE) with multiple transceivers has a possibility to connect to a Macro eNodeB (MeNB) and a Small cell eNodeB (SeNB) simultaneously. In downlink split bearer architecture of DC, a data radio bearer at MeNB gets divided into two; one part is forwarded to the SeNB through a non-ideal backhaul link to the UE, and the other part is forwarded by the MeNB. This may lead to an increase in the total delay at the UE since different packets corresponding to a single transmission may incur varying amounts of delays in the two different paths. Since the resources in the MeNB are shared by background legacy users and foreground users, DC may increase the blocking probability of background users. Moreover, single connectivity to the small cell may increase the blocking probability of foreground users. Therefore, we target to minimize the average delay of the system subject to a constraint on the blocking probability of background and foreground users. The optimal policy is computed and observed to contain a threshold structure. The variation of average system delay is studied for changes in different system parameters.Comment: Conferenc