Dynamic Spectrum Allocation Following Machine Learning-Based Traffic Predictions in 5G

Abstract

The popularity of mobile broadband connectivity continues to grow and thus, the future wireless networks are expected to serve a very large number of users demanding a huge capacity. Employing larger spectral bandwidth and installing more access points to enhance the capacity is not enough to tackle the stated challenge due to related costs and the interference issues involved. In this way, frequency resources are becoming one of the most valuable assets, which require proper utilization and fair distribution. Traditional frequency resource management strategies are often based on static approaches, and are agnostic to the instantaneous demand of the network. These static approaches tend to cause congestion in a few cells, whereas at the same time, might waste those precious resources on others. Therefore, such static approaches are not efficient enough to deal with the capacity challenge of the future network. Thus, in this paper we present a dynamic access-aware bandwidth allocation approach, which follows the dynamic traffic requirements of each cell and allocates the required bandwidth accordingly from a common spectrum pool, which gathers the entire system bandwidth. We perform the evaluation of our proposal by means of real network traffic traces. Evaluation results presented in this paper depict the performance gain of the proposed dynamic access-aware approach compared to two different traditional approaches in terms of utilization and served traffic. Moreover, to acquire knowledge about access network requirement, we present a machine learning-based approach, which predicts the state of the network, and is utilized to manage the available spectrum accordingly. Our comparative results show that, in terms of spectrum allocation accuracy and utilization efficiency, a well designed machine learning-based bandwidth allocation mechanism not only outperforms common static approaches, but even achieves the performance (with a relative error close to 0.04) of an ideal dynamic system with perfect knowledge of future traffic requirements.