Integrated Solutions for Deployment of 6G Mobile Networks

Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) comes forth as a promising computing paradigm to meet the low-delay requirements of computation-intensive applications. In this work, we focus on the task offloading and dispatching problem in MEC, where mobile devices (MDs) can decide to execute tasks locally or offload them to access points (APs), and each AP can dispatch its received tasks to other APs. Specially, we consider both APs and MDs are selfish, which aim to minimize their respective task completion delay. The problem is particularly difficult, as there exists computing resource competition among MDs and APs, respectively. Furthermore, the offloading decisions made by MDs and the dispatching decisions made by APs are interactive. To overcome the challenges, we first formulate the problem as a multi-leader multi-follower Stackelberg game, and rigorously prove the existence of a Stackelberg equilibrium. Then, we propose an efficient approach to achieve a Stackelberg equilibrium, which includes a Q-learning based offloading strategy for MDs and a best response based dispatching strategy for APs. We also demonstrate an upper bound of the total completion delay achieved by our approach with a constant approximation ratio. Extensive simulations are also conducted to show the performance of our approach, compared with baselines.

Recent demands on affordable, portable wireless communication and computation devices have resulted in exponential growth of wireless networks ranging from Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) and Wireless Wide Area Networks (WWAN) to Ad-Hoc and Sensor networks. The major goal of wireless communication is to allow users to communicate together and to have access to global network anytime anywhere. This has led to wide acceptance of infrastructure based cellular networks (WWANs) where mobile stations communicate with a centralized controller, often referred as Access Point (AP) that is connected to the wired networks. On the other hand, WLANs have appeared as dominant popular technologies in many venues including a local area such as an academic campus or an airport terminal. These wireless networks mostly rely on IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi (Wireless Fidelity) technology and its various derived versions (i.e. 802.11a,b,g). IEEE 802.11 standard supports two operational modes: The infrastructure-based Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and an infrastructure-less Ad-Hoc Networks. A WLAN (Conti, 2003) typically imposes the existence of an AP and normally is connected to the wired networks to provide internet access for mobile devices. Obviously, only one hop link is needed to communicate between mobile devices and AP. In contrast, there is no AP or infrastructure in Ad-Hoc networks. Any two stations can communicate directly when they are in the range of reception of each other. To this end, the stations may use multi-hop routing to deliver their packets to destinations. The ad-hoc protocols (Conti, 2003; Mohapatra & Krishnamurthy, 2005) are self-configured for address and routing in the face of mobility and the network topology may change in each configuration. The multi-hop wireless ad-hoc networks, or multi-hop wireless networks enable wireless networking in the environments where the wired or cellular connections are impossible, inadequate, or cost effective (e.g. battle field, disaster recovery, etc.). The popularity of internet over the last decades has resulted in rapid advancement of demanding applications. The Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) (Stevens, 1994) is a well-known de facto protocol in developing today’s internet. Basically, TCP provides a connection-oriented and reliable end-to-end data delivery between two hosts in traditional wired networks. Since TCP is well tuned and due to its wide acceptance in internet, it is desirable to extend and adopt its functionality to wireless networks. On the

With the rapid advancement of the information age, an increasing number of people have started using Wi-Fi tethering, which can turn their mobile phones into mobile access points (APs) to meet their networking needs anywhere. However, the existing energy-saving mechanisms in IEEE 802.11 mainly aim at stations (STAs) and rarely consider APs. To solve the problem of mobile APs’ high energy consumption, we propose an energy-saving protocol for mobile APs, called GreenAP. On the one hand, the protocol is compatible with the original IEEE 802.11 standard. On the other hand, the adaptive strategy in the protocol ensures that the energy consumption of the AP is reduced without affecting the user experience. The energy-saving AP protocol is implemented in NS-2. The experimental results show that GreenAP-3 can enable APs’ sleep duration up to 74.7% when the traffic intensity is low, and the energy consumption can be reduced by 64.6% with small packet delay. In the case of high traffic intensity, the protocol can ensure less packet delay by adaptively adjusting APs’ sleep time, which guarantees that the user experience is not affected under any circumstances.

An Elastic Wireless Local-Area Network (WLAN) system provides a reliable, flexible, and efficient Internet access to users through installations of heterogeneous access points (APs) including dedicated APs (DAPs), virtual APs (VAPs), and mobile APs (MAPs). The number of APs should be carefully selected to optimize the network performance. Specifically, for heavy traffic, a large number of APs are required. However, the dense deployment of APs introduces the inter-AP interferences which may eventually degrade the communication quality when the number of users are few. In this paper, we propose an {\em active access-point configuration algorithm} that activates or deactivates APs according to the changes of network topologies and demands of users for the elastic WLAN system. The algorithm considers the bandwidth difference among heterogeneous AP devices and the total available bandwidth in the network. The number of active APs is minimized to ensure the minimum inter-AP interference subject to the constraints. The host locations can be the candidate positions for the MAPs, because host owners may use them for the Internet access. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated using the WIMNET simulator.

In order to satisfy constantly increasing user demands, in process of transition towards LTE (Long Term Evolution) mobile networks of 4th generation, for 3G UMTS networks potential solution is exploitation of multi-antenna MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) systems, which provide increase in both capacity and reliability. This paper puts an effort to provide a link between link-level and system-level gains introduced by multi-antenna techniques in UMTS systems. Coverage, capacity and achievable data rates are evaluated and presented for Alamouti scheme, TxAA and D-TxAA. Radio mobile planning tool is used for illustration of coverage improvement achieved by implementation of several multi-antenna techniques. Considering system-level gains, it is seen that implementation of MIMO techniques yields larger service area and/or increase in capacity and available data rates maintaining the same bandwidth. Results presented in this paper help making a clear picture of achievable gains, employment costs and answering the question: Should mobile operators invest in upgrading their 3G networks with MIMO techniques and is that investment justified, considering achievable improvements.

Summary form only given. Explosion of different types of wireless communications specifically those associated with emerging 5G networks, machine to machine (M2M) systems, personal communications and body area networks has resulted in an impending “spectrum famine”. Research is underway around the way to find solutions to this problem so that future communications needs of the world can be met. Novel approaches are being proposed to achieve this goal, ranging from techniques exploiting massive MIMO signal processing, use of small cells for high spatial reuse of the spectrum, use of highly heterogeneous networks and Dynamic Spectrum Sharing techniques where spectrum can be shared between incumbent license holders and secondary users.

In indoor positioning environment, the existence of mobile Access Points (APs) has a potential risk in localization effectiveness. To address this problem, we first analogize the process of localization into the process of information propagation in a communication system to obtain the analytical result of localization error bound under the interference of both environment noise and mobile APs. Second, we propose a joint judgment criterion which consists of two judgment sub-criteria to judge the state of each hearable AP. Finally, the extensive experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can precisely detect mobile APs and preserve a satisfactory localization performance.

We consider a wireless network in which a number of users on the ground communicate with an mobile access point (M-AP) mounted in an aerial vehicle. Because the M-AP can be easily placed on a suitable position for relaying data traffic between a source node and a destination node, the use of the M-AP is considered as an important issue for various applications such as military communications. In this network, a different handoff pattern will occur according to the movement of the M-AP. That is, a group of users can be suddenly placed out of cell coverage when the M-AP moves another position. Thus, we propose an efficient handoff decision algorithm based on the combination of absolute values of received signal strength (RSS) and their variation. Numerical and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a higher RSS level during handoff and reduced handoff recognition time compared with the conventional algorithm.

Sensor network with mobile access (SENMA) is an architecture in which randomly deployed low-power sensors are orchestrated by a few powerful mobile access points. This paper considers SENMA from energy-efficiency and information-theoretic perspectives. By allowing sensors to propagate data directly to mobile access points over multiaccess channels and relieving sensors from energy-consuming network functions, SENMA has the potential of offering orders of magnitude of improvement in energy efficiency over the multihop ad hoc architecture, as demonstrated by our analysis on scalability. Optimization configurations of SENMA such as the altitude, the trajectory, and the coverage of access points are considered next, using the sum-rate as the performance metric. Optimal strategies for single and multiple access points are determined. For multiple access points, the possibility of and the gain due to cooperation (i.e., joint decoding of signals received at different access points) are investigated.

Location-based service provisioning is of great interests to wireless Internet service providers (WISPs) to deliver attractive value-added services, such as service advertisements, product marketing, to the special network users according to their geographic coordinates, along with Internet access benefits. It is usually the case that the basic location information is derived from direct interactions between the infrastructure network and the wireless mobile devices. Unfortunately, the Internet access service easily becomes the target of free-riders and attackers by exploiting the location authentication protocols, and collusively forging their location claims. We propose a location authentication and authorization protocol, LBAC (location-based network access control), to securely authenticate the location claims of mobile wireless users, and to securely distribute the shared keys for data encryption purposes. In LBAC, location areas are defined by the shared points of multiple wireless access points. The fact that a mobile node is located at certain places is authenticated by the mobile node collecting all the key information from the corresponding access points. Using Diffie-Hellman algorithm, LBAC authenticates location claims, and derives the keys for each mobile node and access point pair. LBAC eliminates the dependence on global positioning system (GPS) or ultrasonic devices in order to localize the mobile devices. We enumerate possible attacks to the system and analyze their countermeasures. The computational, communicational and the memory requirement are also evaluated

Due to the technological advancement in cellular networks, massive data traffic appends to the existing digital technologies. These emerging digital technologies face quality of service (QoS) challenges, particularly when it comes to maintaining the tradeoffs between customers and service providers. The cellular service providers are trying to meet the needs of end users by handling four substantially different types of data, i.e., Real Time, Video, Audio, and Text, with each type having its own requirements. To achieves an efficient QoS, different incentive-based algorithms were proposed. However, these schemes do not ensure a fair distribution of profit among the mobile network operator and access points. Furthermore, these schemes do not provide efficient QoS to the end user and cannot ensure a fair distribution of channels in crowning time. We propose an incentive-based scheme using game theory and two-stage Stackelberg approach for integrated data, offloading the decision-making process in a heterogeneous network. A single mobile base station and some integrated access points in a crowded metropolitan area are modeled in our proposed scheme. This station offers an economic incentive based on traffic types, and access points compete with each other to earn incentives for offload traffic. A mathematical game is derived to analyze the real-world scenario through simulation. The experimental method is applied to validate the numerical outcomes by comparing the results with other models.

This chapter considers the challenges faced by network operators and service providers accommodating the increasing traffic demands in cellular networks in the most efficient yet inexpensive way. It proposes that these challenges are addressed by offloading part of the traffic to femto cell access points (FAPs) and WiFi access points (WiFiAPs). Whereas 4G micro and pico cell base stations are assumed to be managed by the network operator in terms of setup and maintenance, FAPs and WiFiAPs are normally bought and operated by the end-user. The main difference between these two solutions is that the FAPs operate on the frequency bands assigned to the network operator by national regulators, while WiFiAPs work on unlicensed spectrum. This chapter analyzes the pros and cons of such approaches, and the tradeoffs related to the different mechanisms employed in cellular and WiFi networks for interference management. Moreover, various methods for traffic offloading by the mobile network operator are discussed in detail, including local IP access (LIPA), selective IP traffic offloading (SIPTO), IP flow mobility (IFOM), access network discovery and selection function (ANDSF), and Hotspot 2.0, etc. In the experimental part of this chapter, means for traffic management from the network operator's perspective are discussed, taking into account costs and energy savings. Furthermore, a novel resource usage coordination concept in conjunction with the WiFi offloading concept is presented. Introduction The traffic served by cellular networks grows significantly on a yearly basis, making the efficient, fair, and inexpensive management of users’ traffic demands a real challenge. Various forecasts provided both by legal bodies and commercial companies show that this trend will not change in the future. One can, for example, consider the expectations provided in Table 6.1, created based on the data delivered in the Cisco Visual Networking Index [1, 2] in 2012 and 2013. It is shown that the monthly average traffic generated by mobile devices is foreseen to grow exponentially. Based on [3], it can be stated that in 2017 IP traffic originating from mobile devices will comprise more than 13% of fixed IP traffic, while in 2013 this comprised only around 4% of fixed IP traffic.

The evolution of radio access networks poses significant challenges to the transport networks, including backhaul and fronthaul systems. Ultra-dense small-cell networks in high frequency bands are being considered promising solutions. For beyond 2020 networks, frequency bands up to 100 GHz can be considered for achieving the target increase of 1000 times in the throughput to end users. The deployment of ultra-dense small cells in high frequency bands requires a massive deployment of mobile transport networks. In addition, stringent requirement of low latency sets significant constraints on the transport systems. An analog waveform transmission of mobile signals, especially of those in the millimeter-wave bands, over the transport links would be very attractive to reduce the latency, data rate, and simplify antenna sites. However, for transporting radio signals to a huge number of antenna sites, the use of only fiber-optic transport links will not be sufficient due to the difficulty in the installation of fiber cables, especially in ultra-dense urban areas. An orchestration of different transmission technologies, including wired and wireless systems, would be very important to facilitate the deployment of ultra-dense small cells in future mobile networks. In this paper, we introduce an orchestration of fiber-optics, free-space optics, millimeter-wave, and hybrid systems for high-speed and flexible transmission of mobile signals. We present examples of proof-of-concept demonstrations for each system, indicating that the proposed systems can meet the performance requirements of future mobile signals.

The OpenMobileNetwork is an open platform that provides approximated and semantically enriched mobile network and WiFi access point topology data based on the principles of Linked Data. By making use of the data within the Linking Open Data Cloud, this platform enables the development of new and sophisticated location-based services for the end consumer that also incorporate the semantics of a location rather than plain geospatial information. More importantly, it gives mobile network operators the opportunity to exploit their asset (being their network topology) for innovative services based on semantically enriched data analytics such as identifying location hotspots or traffic heat maps. The foundation of the OpenMobileNetwork is an ontology comprising static and dynamic network context facets that describe mobile and WiFi access point networks from a topological perspective (e.g., base stations, their locations and coverage areas). Within this paper, we present this ontology in detail and demonstrate its applicability in a power management scenario for mobile networks.

The unprecedented growth of mobile data traffic challenges the performance and economic viability of today's cellular networks, and calls for novel network architectures and communication solutions. Data offloading through third-party WiFi or femtocell access points (APs) can effectively alleviate the cellular network congestion in a low operational and capital expenditure. This solution requires the cooperation and agreement of mobile cellular network operators (MNOs) and AP owners (APOs). In this paper, we model and analyze the interaction among one MNO and multiple APOs (for the amount of MNO's offloading data and the respective APOs' compensations) by using the Nash bargaining theory. Specifically, we introduce a one-to-many bargaining game among the MNO and APOs, and analyze the bargaining solution (game equilibrium) systematically under two different bargaining protocols: (i) sequential bargaining, where the MNO bargains with APOs sequentially, with one APO at a time, in a given order, and (ii) concurrent bargaining, where the MNO bargains with all APOs concurrently. We quantify the benefits for APOs when bargaining sequentially and earlier with the MNO, and the losses for APOs when bargaining concurrently with the MNO. We further study the group bargaining scenario where multiple APOs form a group bargaining with the MNO jointly, and quantify the benefits for APOs when forming such a group. Interesting, our analysis indicates that grouping of APOs not only benefits the APOs in the group, but may also benefit some APOs not in the group. Our results shed light on the economic aspects and the possible outcomes of the MNO/APOs interactions, and can be used as a roadmap for designing policies for this promising data offloading solution.