Handoff Management in Macro-Femto Cellular Networks

With the rapid increase in data traffic and high data rate demands from cellular users, conventional cellular networks are becoming insufficient to fulfill these requirements. Femto cells are integrated in macro cellular network to increase the capacity, coverage, and to fulfill the increasing demands of the users. Time required for handoff process between the cells became more sensitive and complex with the introduction of femto cells in the network. Public internet which connect the femto base station with the mobile core network induces higher latency if conventional handoff procedures are also employed in macro-femto cell network. So, handoff process will become slower and network operation will become insufficient. Some standards, procedures, and protocols should be defined for macro-femto cell network rather than using existing protocols. This chapter presents a comprehensive survey of handoff process, types of handoff in macro-femto cell network, and proposed methods and schemes for frequent and unnecessary handoff reduction for efficient network operation.

Game Theory for Cooperation in Multi-Access Edge Computing

Cooperative strategies amongst network players can improve network performance and spectrum utilization in future networking environments. Game Theory is very suitable for these emerging scenarios, since it models high-complex interactions among distributed decision makers. It also finds the more convenient management policies for the diverse players (e.g., content providers, cloud providers, edge providers, brokers, network providers, or users). These management policies optimize the performance of the overall network infrastructure with a fair utilization of their resources. This chapter discusses relevant theoretical models that enable cooperation amongst the players in distinct ways through, namely, pricing or reputation. In addition, the authors highlight open problems, such as the lack of proper models for dynamic and incomplete information scenarios. These upcoming scenarios are associated to computing and storage at the network edge, as well as, the deployment of large-scale IoT systems. The chapter finalizes by discussing a business model for future networks.

Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The advent of heterogeneous broadband wireless access networks (BWANs) has been to support the ever-increasing cellular networks' data requirements by increasing capacity, spectrum efficiency, and network coverage. The focus of this chapter is to discuss the implementation details (i.e., architecture and network components), issues associated with heterogeneous BWANs (i.e., handovers, network selection, and base station placement), and also the various resource allocation schemes (i.e., shared resource allocation in split handover and inter-RAT self-organizing networks) that can improve the performance of the system by maximizing the network capacity.

Principles and Enabling Technologies of 5G Network Slicing

5G mobile systems can be comprehended as highly flexible and programmable E2E networking infrastructures that provide increased performance in terms of capacity, latency, reliability, and energy efficiency while meeting a plethora of diverse requirements from multiple services. Network slicing is emerging as a prospective paradigm to meet these requirements with reduced operating cost and improved time and space functionality. A network slice is the way to provide better resource isolation and increased statistical multiplexing. With dynamic slicing, 5G will operate on flexible zone of the network, permitting varying, adaptable levels or bandwidth and reliability. In this chapter, a comprehensive survey of network slicing is presented from an E2E perspective, detailing its origination and current standardization efforts, principal concepts, enabling technologies, as well as applicable solutions. In particular, it provides specific slicing solutions for each part of the 5G systems, encompassing orchestration and management in the radio access and the core network domains.

Managing 5G Converged Core With Access Traffic Steering, Switching, and Splitting

This chapter discusses the ongoing work around hybrid access and network convergence, with particular emphasis on recent works on ATSSS in 3GPP. Three main aspects are analyzed: policy enforcement, integration with 5G QoS framework, interaction with underlying multi-path transport protocol. The chapter also provides some preliminary testbed results showing the benefits of ATSSS in the management of multiple accesses analyzing some primary performance indicators such as achievable data rates, link utilization for aggregated traffic, and session setup latency. The chapter also provides some results by considering two examples of realization of ATSSS policies to avoid inefficiency in link utilization and to allow the fulfillment of data rate requirements.

Converged Fi-Wi Passive Optical Networks and Their Designing Using the HPON Network Configurator

With the emerging mobile applications and needs of ever-increasing bandwidth, it is anticipated that the next-generation passive optical network (NG-PON) with much higher bandwidth is a natural path forward to satisfy these demands and to develop valuable converged fiber-wireless access networks for wireless network operators. NG-PON systems present optical access infrastructures to support various applications of many service providers. Hybrid passive optical networks (HPON) present a necessary phase to future PON networks utilized the optical transmission medium – the optical fiber. For developing hybrid passive optical networks, there exist various architectures and directions. They are specified with emphasis on their basic characteristics. For proposing reliable and survivable architectures, traffic protection schemes must be implemented. For converging Fi-Wi passive optical networks, an integration of optical and wireless technologies into common broadband access network must be considered. Finally, the HPON network configurator as the interactive software tool is introduced.

Resource Management of Mixed Unicast and Multicast Services Over LTE

In recent years, mobile operators are observing a growing demand of multicast services over radio cellular networks. In this scenario, multicasting is the technology exploited to serve a group of users who simultaneously request the same data content. Since multicast applications are expected to be massively exchanged over the forthcoming fifth generation (5G) systems, the third-generation partnership project (3GPP) defined the multimedia broadcast multicast service (MBMS) standard. MBMS supports multicast services over long-term evolution (LTE), and the 4G wireless technology provides high quality services in mobile environments. Nevertheless, several issues related to the management of MBMS services together with more traditional unicast services are still open. The aim of this chapter is to analyze the main challenges in supporting heterogeneous traffic over LTE with particular attention to resource management, considered as the key aspect for an effective provisioning of mobile multimedia services over cellular networks.

Clustering and 5G-Enabled Smart Cities

This chapter highlights the importance of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) in the context of the 5G-enabled smarter cities and roads, a topic that attracts significant interest. In order for VANETs and its associated applications to become a reality, a very promising avenue is to bring together multiple wireless technologies in the architectural design. 5G is envisioned to have a heterogeneous network architecture. Clustering is employed in designing optimal VANET architectures that successfully use different technologies. Therefore, clustering has the potential to play an important role in the 5G-VANET-enabled solutions. This chapter presents a survey of clustering approaches in the VANET research area. The survey provides a general classification of the clustering algorithms, presents some of the most advanced and latest algorithms in VANETs, and it is among the fewest works in the literature that reviews the performance assessment of clustering algorithms.

An Improved Modeling for Network Selection Based on Graph Theory and Cost Function in Heterogeneous Wireless Systems

The next generation of mobile wireless communications represents a heterogeneous environment which integrates variety of network generation like third generation (3G), fourth generation (4G), and fifth generation (5G). The major challenge in this heterogeneous environment is to decide which access point to use when multiple networks are available. Process of roaming mobile user from one technology to anther different is called vertical handover. In this chapter, the authors propose a new mechanism based on graph theory and cost function in order to determine the best path for the end user in terms of quality of service (QoS) when the vertical handover process is needed. Then, they investigate the impact of some existing weighting methods in order to determine the suitable method which can be coupled with the cost function. The experiments evaluation by using Mininet emulator demonstrate that the proposed approach can achieve a significant improvement concerning four QoS metrics: throughput, packet lost, packet delay, and packer jitter for two services FTP and video streaming.

QoS-Aware Green Communication Strategies for Optimal Utilization of Resources in 5G Networks

With increase in demand of data traffic with no compromise on the underlying quality of service (QoS), the coexistence problem arises due to high electricity consumption by the network architecture which results in a huge CO2 emission and thereby causing various health hazards. Efficient utilization of the resources can reduce the cost of power consumption which will increase the economy-characteristics of the network. The resource consumption can be reduced under an intelligent technology-neutral policies which optimizes the deployment of the network architecture along with their transmit power paving the way for fifth generation (5G) in green wireless communications. On another front, the ultra-dense deployment of the small cells can increase the frequency reuse factor as well as help in reducing the energy consumption. This chapter designs the energy efficient networks while satisfying the underlying QoS by joint optimization of available resources depending on the interoperability challenges in terrestrial, underwater acoustic, and free space optical (FSO) communications.