Airport Connectivity Optimization for 5G Ultra-Dense Networks

Abstract

The rapid increase of air traffic demand and complexity of radio access network motivate developing scalable wireless communications by adopting system intelligence. The lack of adaptive reconfiguration in radio transmission systems may cause dramatic impacts on the traffic management concerning congestion and demand-capacity imbalances. This has driven the industry to jointly access licensed and unlicensed bands for improved airport connectivity. Therefore, intelligent system is embedded into fifth generation (5G) ultra-dense networks (UDNs) to provision dense and irregular deployments that support extended coverage and improved energy-efficiency for the entire airport network at higher throughputs. To define the technical aspects of the proposed solution, this paper addresses new intelligent technique that configures the coverage and capacity factors of radio access network considering the changes in air traffic demands. This technique is analysed through mathematical models that employ power consumption constraints to support dynamic traffic control requirements to improve the overall network capacity. The presented problem is formulated for medium or large airport air transportation network. The power optimization problem is solved using linear programming with careful consideration to latency and energy efficiency factors. Specifically, an intelligent pilot power method is adopted to maintain the connectivity throughout multi-interface technologies by assuming minimum power requirements. Numerical and system-level analysis are conducted to validate the performance of the proposed schemes for both licenced macrocell New Radio (NR) and unlicensed wireless fidelity (WiFi) topologies. Finally, the insights of problem modelling with intelligent techniques provide significant advantages at reasonable complexity and brings the great opportunity to improve the airport network capacity.