Mobility Analysis and Management for Heterogeneous Networks

Authors

Karthik Vasudeva, Florida International UniversityFollow

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Major/Program

Electrical Engineering

First Advisor's Name

Ismail Guvenc

First Advisor's Committee Title

Major Advisor

Second Advisor's Name

Jean H. Andrian

Second Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Third Advisor's Name

Kang K. Yen

Third Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fourth Advisor's Name

Deng Pan

Fourth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Fifth Advisor's Name

David Lopez-Perez

Fifth Advisor's Committee Title

Committee Member

Date of Defense

6-29-2017

Abstract

The global mobile data traffic has increased tremendously in the last decade due to the technological advancement in smartphones. Their endless usage and bandwidth-intensive applications will saturate current 4G technologies and has motivated the need for concrete research in order to sustain the mounting data traffic demand. In this regard, the network densification has shown to be a promising direction to cope with the capacity demands in future 5G wireless networks. The basic idea is to deploy several low power radio access nodes called small cells closer to the users on the existing large radio foot print of macrocells, and this constitutes a heterogeneous network (HetNet).

However, there are many challenges that operators face with the dense HetNet deployment. The mobility management becomes a challenging task due to triggering of frequent handovers when a user moves across the network coverage areas. When there are fewer users associated in certain small cells, this can lead to significant increase in the energy consumption. Intelligently switching them to low energy consumption modes or turning them off without seriously degrading user performance is desirable in order to improve the energy savings in HetNets. This dynamic power level switching in the small cells, however, may cause unnecessary handovers, and it becomes important to ensure energy savings without compromising handover performance. Finally, it is important to evaluate mobility management schemes in real network deployments, in order to find any problems affecting the quality of service (QoS) of the users. The research presented in this dissertation aims to address these challenges.

First, to tackle the mobility management issue, we develop a closed form, analytical model to study the handover and ping-pong performance as a function of network parameters in the small cells, and verify its performance using simulations. Secondly, we incorporate fuzzy logic based game-theoretic framework to address and examine the energy efficiency improvements in HetNets. In addition, we design fuzzy inference rules for handover decisions and target base station selection is performed through a fuzzy ranking technique in order to enhance the mobility robustness, while also considering energy/spectral efficiency. Finally, we evaluate the mobility performance by carrying out drive test in an existing 4G long term evolution (LTE) network deployment using software defined radios (SDR). This helps to obtain network quality information in order to find any problems affecting the QoS of the users.

Identifier

FIDC001983

ORCID

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1198-5346

Recommended Citation

Vasudeva, Karthik, "Mobility Analysis and Management for Heterogeneous Networks" (2017). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3348.
https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/3348