Mobile Small Cells for Further Enhanced 5G Heterogeneous Networks

A heterogeneous network (HetNet) is a network topology composed by deploying multiple HetNets under the coverage of macro cells (MCs). It can improve network throughput, extend cell coverage, and offload network traffic; for example, the network traffic of a 5G mobile communications network. A HetNet involves a mix of radio technologies and various cell types working together seamlessly. In a HetNet, coordination between MCs and small cells (SCs) has a positive impact on the performance of the networks contained within, and consequently on the overall user experience. Therefore, to improve user‐perceived service quality, HetNets require high‐efficiency network protocols and enhanced radio technologies. In this paper, we introduce a 5G HetNet comprised of MCs and both fixed and mobile SCs (mSCs). The featured mSCs can be mounted on a car, bus, or train and have different characteristics to fixed SCs (fSCs). In this paper, we address the technical challenges related to mSCs. In addition, we analyze the network performance under two HetNet scenarios — MCs and fSCs, and MCs and mSCs.     

Downlink energy efficiency modeling and optimization with backhaul awareness and interference price in ultra cellular HetNet

The cellular heterogeneous network(HetNet) with ultra dense small cells is called ultra cellular HetNet.The energy efficiency for this network is very important for future green wireless communications.The data rates and power consumptions for three parts(i.e.,macro cells,small cells,and mixed backhaul links) in ultra cellular HetNet are jointly formulated to model downlink energy efficiency considering the active base stations(BSs) and inactive BSs.Then,in order to decrease the downlink co-channel interference,the interference price functions are also jointly set up for the three parts in ultra cellular HetNet.Next,energy efficiency optimization iterative algorithm scheme using the fractional programming and Lagrangian multiplier with constraints for density of ultra dense small cells and fraction of mixed backhaul links is presented with interference pricing.The convergence and computation complexity are also proved in this scheme.The numerical simulations finally demonstrate convergence behavior of the proposed algorithm.By comparison,some conclusion can be drawn.Maximizing energy efficiency of system is lower as the density of small cell is high.The effect on maximizing energy efficiency with interference price outperforms that without interference price.And the energy efficiency increases as the fraction of mixed backhaul links is higher because of more power consumption in the microwave backhaul links.     

A network-assisted flow mobility architecture for optimized mobile medical multimedia transmission

A large part of mobile Health (mHealth) use-cases such as remote patient monitoring/diagnosis, teleconsultation, and guided surgical intervention requires advanced and reliable mobile communication solutions to provide efficient multimedia transmission with strict medical level Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Experience (QoE) provision. The increasing deployment of overlapping wireless access networks enables the possibility to offer the required network resources for ubiquitous and pervasive mHealth services. To address the challenges and support the above use-cases in today’s heterogeneous network (HetNet) environments, we propose a network-assisted flow-based mobility management architecture for optimized real-time mobile medical multimedia communication. The proposed system is empirically evaluated in a Pan-European HetNet testbed with multi-access Android-based mobile devices. We observed that the proposed scheme significantly improves the objective QoE of simultaneous real-time high-resolution electrocardiography and high-definition ultrasound transmissions while also enhances traffic load balancing capabilities of wireless architectures.     

TD-LTE异构网层间互操作策略与实现机制分析

本文首先介绍了TD—LTE异构网的基本概念,针对中国移动TDD频谱资源和网络部署需求提出了异构网在近、中期建网中的具体实现形态,并基于此提出了异构网层间移动性管理的基本要求,随后重点分析了3GPP规范定义的层间互操作机制的特性,并就基于质量和优先级的小区选择,基于频率优先级和负荷的层间切换机制在中国移动多频组网状态下的实施策略和实现机制进行了分析,提出了完整和具体的实现方案。     

An optimized small-cell planning procedure for Heterogeneous Network to improve network energy efficiency

Cell planning in conventional networks has gained more attention as it directly affects the network performance and deployment cost. Existing cell planning methodologies are framed either with identical base stations or constructing a network without any infrastructure. But heterogeneous networks (HetNets) allow the service provider to deploy small cells over the region to enhance the network performance and signal coverage probability. Thus, a small-cell planning procedure is presented in this research work considering the low-powered base station and deployment cost to enhance the energy efficiency of the HetNet. An adaptive fuzzy expert system is used for cell dimensioning, and a nature-inspired ant colony optimization model is employed for automatic base station placement. Simulation analysis demonstrates that the proposed small-cell planning procedure attains better energy efficiency and user satisfaction ratio compared to conventional planning strategies. In the two cases of simulation analysis, the proposed model attains an average of 85% user satisfaction ratio for case 1 and 87% for case 2, which is better than existing strategies like density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN), k-means, and number-based spatial clustering (NBSC) algorithms.     

Impact of picocells on the capacity and energy efficiency of mobile networks

The deployment of small cells in mobile networks has aroused a large interest in the last few years. This paper investigates the impact of picocell deployment on the performance and power consumption of mobile networks. Since different network upgrades introduce different performance gains, comparing different configurations exclusively on their overall power consumption can be rather biased. For this reason, a new key performance indicator, termed “energy efficiency”, is introduced and used throughout this study, bringing together network performance and its overall power consumption. In the first section of the study, a theoretical analysis for the Erlang-like capacity of a network, considering a uniform topology and traffic, is performed, using queuing theory analysis, namely processor-sharing queues. Results show that in all cases the deployment of picocells improve the performance of the network, however the energy efficiency is noted to be dependent on the deployment scenario considered. In the second part of the study, a more realistic scenario with non-uniform topology and traffic is considered, which is carried out through a large-scale system level simulator. Results show that by deploying picocells in areas experiencing high levels of traffic, the energy efficiency of the network can be considerably improved.     

Throughput and cost‐efficient interference cancelation strategies for the downlink of spectrum‐sharing Long Term Evolution heterogeneous networks

In a heterogeneous network (HetNet), small cells such as femtocells considered in this work are deployed jointly with macrocells. This new cells' layer, when added to the network, generates interference, which could hamper neighboring macro‐user equipment (MUE) and femto‐user equipment (FUE) transmissions. In fact, this interference results in degradation of the network performance. In this paper, we propose a downlink interference cancelation (DL‐IC) strategy for spectrum‐sharing Long Term Evolution (LTE) HetNet. This DL‐IC strategy aims to reduce the interference impact on users by optimizing their received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) using new utility functions for both FUEs and MUEs. These utility functions allow relaxation of the cancelation ratios in order to reduce implementation complexity while maximizing SINR, QoS, and throughput. We support by different system‐level simulations that both global network performance and user experience in terms of total throughput and received SNR or link‐level throughput, respectively, are significantly enhanced. Throughput gains achievable by the new DL‐IC strategy can reach as much as 200% against a homogeneous LTE network without IC along with an extra 48% per additional femtocell base station against a basic spectrum‐sharing LTE HetNet without IC. These performance figures are shown to surpass those achieved by interference avoidance techniques using either power or frequency resource allocation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Toward green 5G heterogeneous small-cell networks: power optimization using load balancing technique

The overwhelming demand for data by an ever-increasing number of users is a great challenge wireless cellular networks are faced with. One potential solution to this issue is deploying a massive number of small cells (SCs) in the existing macro network. As SC overlay has a big role in the future wireless networks that can overcome the data traffic upsurge at little power cost, heterogeneous network (HetNet) has been viewed as a promising technology for 5G networks that extends cell coverage, improves network capacity and offloads the network traffic from the macro cell (MC) to the SCs. However, the hyper-dense SCs and their uncorrelated operation raise an important question about the joint power consumption of the macro base station (MBS) and the small base stations (SBSs) in the HetNet since the aggregate power consumption of the dense SBSs cannot be ignored. Recently, the SC sleeping technique has become a hot topic for saving energy in HetNets. To minimize power consumption in HetNets, we propose three algorithms to dynamically adapt the operation of the SBSs to active/sleep (on/off) for non-uniform user distribution in the HetNet. We investigate the general optimal power minimization problem for HetNet that requires relatively high computational complexity. Taking into account the additional increase of the traffic load brought to the MBS, a key design principle of the proposed algorithms is to switch off the SBSs gradually based on their locations, user densities in their coverage areas or the highest power that can be saved by switching some of them off, respectively. Then, we enhance the mathematical framework to make the analysis more realistic by considering the offloading between the SCs and the MBS that occurs when the traffic load exceeds SCs’ capacity. In this paper, based on the fact that user densities of SCs and MC change with time, we model the traffic on the European traffic profile and portray the power consumption of the HetNet throughout the day. Simulation results show that by applying SC sleeping and our proposed algorithms, the HetNet can save about 20% power daily. The performances of our proposed algorithms are close to that of the optimal algorithm and their computational complexities are remarkably lower.     

Physical layer security performance analysis of multi-antenna full-duplex relay aided heterogeneous cellular network

To alleviate the spectrum shortage problem and security threats in heterogeneous network (HetNet),multi-antenna full-duplex relay was introduced for communication between femto base station (FBS) and legitimate user.With the aid of multi-antenna full-duplex relay in FBS network,the secrecy performance of HetNets could be improved.Under a stochastic geometry framework,the fundamental analysis model to evaluate the secrecy performance in multi-antenna full-duplex relay aided HetNet was set up.To be specific,the exact expressions for the secrecy outage probability of the typical user,serving relays and HetNet were derived respectively.Then,based on the theoretical analyses and simulation results,the influences of transmit power and antenna number of both macro base station and FBS on secrecy performance in HetNet were examined.Finally,the results show that introducing multi-antenna full-duplex relay for FBS networks improves the secrecy performance of HetNet.     

Performance analysis of an advanced heterogeneous mobile network architecture with multiple small cell layers

The integration of small cell technologies into the current mobile network operators is a necessity for providing capacity and coverage improvement in the future mobile networks (5G). This integration paves the way for heterogeneous networking. In this paper, a novel heterogeneous architecture for the efficient integration of small cell technology into the current mobile networks is developed, namely advanced heterogeneous mobile network (AHMN). AHMN architecture consists of a stack of multiple cell layers wherein the upper layer is the macrocell layer while under this layer, a number of lower small cell layers are formed. Focusing on femtocells and metrocells, as the most typical paradigms of small cells, a femtocell layer which serves the indoor traffic activity of femtocell users is considered, while the metrocell serves the outdoor traffic activities as well as the overflow traffic from femtocells. The overall heterogeneous network (HetNet) is completed with the macrocell overlay layer, which serves only the macrocell users and the overflowed traffic from the underlay metrocell layer. In the proposed AHMN architecture, the metrocell layer is deployed as a complementary layer between the macrocell and femtocell layers and facilitates the handover traffic interaction between the edge layers. Meanwhile, the mobility management in this architecture is critical and hence, the interaction between successive network layers, due to the handover (HO) traffic, is analyzed. Furthermore, for each network layer, a guard channel scheme is proposed in order to minimize the HO dropping rate of the mobile users. We show both analytically and by simulation the capability of AHMN in offloading traffic and reducing the blocking/dropping probability compared with the traditional macrocellular network.     

An analysis of VoIP service using 1/spl times/EV-DO revision a system

While voice-over-Internet protocol (VoIP) on wireline network is maturing, VoIP on wireless mobile network is still in its infancy. This disparity is due to the fact that the wireline bandwidth is abundant and can be traded off for delay performance and overhead, whereas bandwidth in wireless mobile network is still a scarce resource. With the deployment of 1/spl times/EV-DO revision 0 (DOr0) worldwide, the spectrum efficiency has been significantly improved. However, DOr0 still lacks of features essential for VoIP. For this reason, 1/spl times/EV-DO revision A (DOrA) has been standardized in the 3GPP2 with many improvements favorable for VoIP implementation. In this paper, we identify challenges and explore the feasibility of implementing VoIP using DOrA. We develop both analytical and simulation models to evaluate the VoIP capacity and delay performance over the air interface.     

A Novel HGBBDSA-CTI Approach for Subcarrier Allocation in Heterogeneous Network

Telecommunication Systems - In recent times, Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) achieves the capacity and coverage for indoors through the deployment of small cells i.e. femtocells (HeNodeBs). These...     

基于CoMP传输的分布式异构网络资源分配

摘要：提高无线资源利用效率是缓解日益增长的无线通信需求和有限的可用传输资源之间矛盾的主要途径。基于多点协调（coordinated multipoint,CoMP）传输技术的异构网络在提高频谱效率和能量效率方面具有巨大的潜力,近年来受到学术界和工业界的广泛关注。在研究基于CoMP技术的异构网络资源分配问题的基础上,提出了一种基于交叉熵方法的分布式频谱资源调度算法。仿真实验验证了本文提出方法在系统吞吐量、能量效率以及用户公平性等方面的有效性。     

基于干扰贡献比的密集异构网络小小区开关算法

小小区密集部署的异构网络是5G系统提升网络容量与数据速率的最有效的关键技术之一.随着小小区的大量部署,小小区之间的同频干扰以及小小区基站（Small Cell Base Stations,SeNBs）的能耗问题愈发显著.为提高SeNBs能效并降低小小区间的同频干扰,提出一种基于干扰贡献比（Interference Contribution Ratio,ICR）的小小区开关算法,可以仅通过较少的用户设备（User Equipment,UE）信息反馈量与测量过程实现有效的小小区开关操作.仿真表明,所提算法在保持较低的小小区业务损失量的前提下,能有效地降低小小区之间的同频干扰,提高网络总速率与SeNBs能效.     

Analyzing the Economic Effects of Past Mobile Network Sharing Deals for Future Network Deployment

The increase in data traffic calls for investment in mobile networks; however, the saturating revenue of mobile broadband and increasing capital expenditure are discouraging mobile operators from investing in next-generation mobile networks. Mobile network sharing is a viable solution for operators and regulators to resolve this dilemma. This research uses a difference-in-differences analysis of 33 operators (including 11 control operators) to empirically evaluate the cost reduction effect of mobile network sharing. The results indicate a reduction in overall operating expenditure and short-term capital expenditure by national roaming. This finding implies that future technology and standards development should focus on flexible network operation and maintenance, energy efficiency, and maximizing economies of scale in radio access networks. Furthermore, mobile network sharing will become more viable and relevant in a 5G network deployment as spectrum bands are likely to increase the total cost of ownership of mobile networks and technical enablers will facilitate network sharing.     

Analysis of Neighbourhood Relations for Femtocell Networks

Nowadays mobile operators are trying to find an economic solution to improve coverage, mainly indoor, and to meet exponentially growing data traffic demands. A cost-effective means to manage these challenges represent small cells, such as metrocells or femtocells. However, in highly populated areas, a large number of these cells can be deployed and can operate in a network. Thus, to enable smooth and simple deployment of small cells, self-organizing concept has to be employed, including an automatic cell identifier assignment mechanism.Due to limited number of available cell identifiers, Physical Cell Identities (PCI), a de-sign of the PCI assignment algorithm is a challenging task, especially in dense small cell environment. In our work, we focus on neighbour relations of densely deployed femtocells because number of neighbouring cells and their relations have direct impact on the PCI assignment algorithm design. Since femtocells are not conventionally deployed by operator but by users, the cells tend to form cell clusters. We investigate these clusters of cells and their structures under different scenarios such as number of cells or radius of cell. Based on our study, the PCI assignment algorithms can be adapted and can be optimised to actual state of a network.     

A Study of Densification Management Using Energy Efficient Femto-Cloud Based 5G Mobile Network

Energy efficiency in wireless communication becomes essential. Power optimization of mobile radio systems has gained attention of network operators because energy costs make up a huge part of operational expenditure. In this regard, deployments of low power small cell base stations considerably raise the challenge of energy-efficient cellular networks. Network densification refers to densification over space, for example dense small cell deployment like picocell, femtocell, and frequency utilization of larger segments of radio spectrum in dissimilar bands. In this article we have illustrated the cause factors of densification and described its effects. The deployment layouts of different base stations are studied and compared with conventional macro-femtocell systems from the perspective of area power consumption and signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio.     

运营商网络中基于深度强化学习的服务功能链迁移机制

为改善运营商网络提供的移动服务体验,该文研究服务功能链(SFC)的在线迁移问题。首先基于马尔可夫决策过程(MDP)对服务功能链中的多个虚拟网络功能(VNF)在运营商网络中的驻留位置迁移进行模型化分析。通过将强化学习和深度神经网络相结合提出一种基于双深度Q网络(double DQN)的服务功能链迁移机制,该迁移方法能在连续时间下进行服务功能链的在线迁移决策并避免求解过程中的过度估计。实验结果表明,该文所提出的策略相比于固定部署算法和贪心算法在端到端时延和网络系统收益等方面优势明显,有助于运营商改善服务体验和资源的使用效率。     

新一代超密集异构蜂窝无线网络研究

近年来,随着移动互联网的蓬勃发展和智能终端的快速普及,对无缝网络覆盖和高速数据传输要求日趋增强,超密集异构蜂窝无线网络通过减小小区半径,增加低功率节点数量进行超密集组网,提高无线资源利用率和频谱效率,因而引起了国内外研究学者的广泛关注。然而,超密集异构蜂窝无线网络中愈发密集的网络部署也带来了各种严峻的问题,包括超密集异构蜂窝无线网络中的系统干扰问题、无线信息的安全传输问题、以及网络运营的能量供给问题等。为此,本文首先简单介绍了超密集异构蜂窝无线网络架构,接着从干扰管理、物理层安全和能量效率等方面,深入分析了超密集异构蜂窝无线网络中的关键技术和当前挑战,最后,进一步展望了超密集异构蜂窝无线网络的未来发展。      

Massive MIMO异构网的高能效资源分配

为满足第五代移动通信系统高频谱效率和高能量效率的需求,提出一种工作在不同频段下行两层异构网中的高能量效率资源分配方法,考虑用户数据率需求和基站最大发射功率。天线和传输带宽是影响系统能量效率的关键因素。通过研究宏基站和小基站的天线资源和带宽分配发现:当系统天线数很大时,发射功耗的影响可以忽略不计;给定带宽分配因子时,达到宏基站或微基站最大发射功率的天线分配因子几乎可以达到最高能效;给定天线分配因子时,系统平均总功耗是关于带宽分配因子的下凸函数,存在全局最优带宽分配因子使能效最高。仿真结果表明,与给定带宽和天线资源的异构网和小小区网络相比,所提出的异构网可以显著提高系统能量效率,而且在大量用户、高数据率需求时能效提升更明显。