Radio Access Technology Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks for Revenue Maximization
Abstract
Wireless networks have witnessed a great success recently. The number of users along with the traffic demands have grown exponentially. Therefore, the wireless resources of a single Radio Access Technology (RAT) might not be sufficient to meet this increase in traffic demand.
Recently, several new technologies have been standardized, which made it common to encounter geographical areas where two or more RATs have overlapping coverage, forming the so-called Heterogeneous Wireless Networks (HWNs). This gives the opportunity to exploit the pool of resources of the coexisting RATs in order to boost the capacity, and subsequently generate higher revenue. However, this requires coordination among the different RATs, known in the literature as Common Radio Resource Management (CRRM).
This work is devoted to shedding light on the importance of CRRM, and the role it can play in increasing the generated revenue in HWNs scenarios. This choice is dictated by the importance of the economic aspects for the success of the wireless services business. Moreover, this aspect has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature where the focus has been mainly on the user’s perspective.
The considered system is a cellular / Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) overlay network which can be easily found in real scenarios, and the emphasis is mainly on RAT selection which is the first involved CRRM component when a new connection request is received.
First, RAT selection schemes that prioritize the traffic with the highest contribution to the revenue are proposed, showing the impact that these schemes have on revenue as well as the Quality of Service (QoS). Additionally, the role of WLAN offloading in alleviating the traffic load from the cellular RAT is highlighted.
Second, revenue-maximizing RAT selection policies are implemented. To this end, Markov Decision Process (MDP) is used to derive the optimal policy. An investigation of MDP as a tool for modeling RAT selection problems has been conducted, including how to tune the involved parameters in order to achieve the targeted goal.
Another aspect that is covered by this work is net neutrality, which can be seen as an additional constraint when taking RAT selection decisions. Applying net neutrality regulations involves providing equal treatment to all Internet traffic. However, it allows granting exemption to some non- Internet access traffic know as specialized services. This case has been integrated in the modeling of RAT selection policies, and the impact of net neutrality adoption on the performance of various RAT selection policies, each having different admission strategy, is shown. The results depict that, with a careful choice of the RAT selection strategy, the loss in revenue caused by applying net neutrality could be reduced.
The effect of net neutrality is then further investigated by considering different ways of bandwidth reservation for specialized services. The aim is to figure out which way of bandwidth reservation achieves better results, and to study the impact of the ratio of reserved bandwidth for specialized services on the revenue. The results indicate that it would be more beneficial to dedicate bandwidth for specialized services in the whole HWN as compared to reserving the bandwidth in cellular RAT only, as the QoS experienced by the Internet access services is less affected in the first case.
In this research work, RAT selection problem is tackled from an operator’s perspective. However, both operator’s and user’s perspectives can be seen as complimentary. While the focus is on revenue maximization, QoS metrics are considered when comparing the studied RAT selection schemes.
Has parts
Paper A: Khloussy, Elissar; Xu, Jie; Kim, Anna N.; Jiang, Yuming. Maximizing Network Revenue through Resource Management in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks. Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications 2011 http://doi.org/10.1109/ISCC.2011.6024143 - © 2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Paper B: Khloussy, Elissar; Gelabert, Xavier; Jiang, Yuming. A Revenue-Maximizing Scheme for Radio Access Technology Selection in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks with User Profile Differentiation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2013 ;Volum 8115. s. 66-77. The final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40552-5_7
Paper C: Khloussy, Elissar; Gelabert, Xavier; Jiang, Yuming. Investigation on MDP-based radio access technology selection in heterogeneous wireless networks. Computer Networks 2015 ;Volum 91. s. 57-67 - Publisher version available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2015.08.005
Paper D: Khloussy, Elissar; Jiang, Yuming. The impact of net neutrality on revenue and quality of service in wireless networks. I: 2018 15th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC) http://doi.org.10.1109/CCNC.2018.8319209 - © 2018IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Paper E: Khloussy, Elissar; Jiang, Yuming Revenue-Maximizing Radio Access Technology Selection with Net Neutrality Compliance in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Volume 2018, Article ID 9706813, 9 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/9706813 This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.