Abstract
The expected huge increase of mobile devices and user data demand by 2020 will stress the current mobile network in an unprecedented way. The future mobile networks must meet several strong requirements regarding the data rate, latency, quality of service and experience, mobility, spectrum and energy efficiency. Therefore, efforts for more efficient mobile network solutions have been recently initiated. To this direction, load balancing has attracted much attention as a promising solution for higher resource utilization, improved system performance and decreased operational cost. It is an effective method for balancing the traffic and alleviating the congestion among heterogeneous networks in the upcoming 5G networks. In this paper, we focus on an offloading scenario for load balancing among LTE and Wi-Fi networks. Additionally, network graphs methodology and its abstracted parameters are investigated in order to better manage wireless resource allocation among multiple connections. The COHERENT architectural framework, which consists of two main control components, makes use of such abstracted network graphs for controlling or managing various tasks such as traffic steering, load balancing, spectrum sharing and RAN sharing. As a result, the COHERENT project eventually develops a unified programmable control framework used to efficiently coordinate the underlying heterogeneous mobile networks as a whole.
Highlights
The COHERENT project [1] focuses on developing a generation unified control and coordination framework for various heterogeneous radio access networks, but with focus on LTE and Wi-Fi
It adopts the concept of resource and service virtualization across technology domains, while the key innovation of the project is the development of a unified programmable control framework used to coordinate the underlying heterogeneous mobile networks as a whole
The flexibility, programmability and efficient control and coordination have been promised by the COHERENT architecture for RAT, by using abstracted network graphs, central control and coordinator (C3) and real time controller (RTC)
Summary
The COHERENT project [1] focuses on developing a generation unified control and coordination framework for various heterogeneous radio access networks, but with focus on LTE and Wi-Fi. Offloading has been proposed as a candidate solution for improving the cellular utilization by delivering data originally targeted for cellular networks via complementary network technologies [3]. This promising solution can significantly lower the operational cost of a network operator, especially when existing deployed infrastructure is exploited. Femtocell technique was initially proposed to improve indoor voice and data services of cellular networks [5], [6] and [9]. It is used to offload traffic from the cellular network to opportunistic peer-to-peer mobile network by selecting some users as the initial set to push the contents.
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