Proactive Drone-Cell Deployment: Overload Relief for a Cellular Network Under Flash Crowd Traffic

Abstract

This paper is concerned with providing radio access network (RAN) elements (supply) for flash crowd traffic demands. The concept of multi-tier cells [heterogeneous networks (HetNets)] has been introduced in 5G network proposals to alleviate the erratic supply–demand mismatch. However, since the locations of the RAN elements are determined mainly based on the long-term traffic behavior in 5G networks, even the HetNet architecture will have difficulty in coping up with the cell overload induced by flash crowd traffic. In this paper, we propose a proactive drone-cell deployment framework to alleviate overload conditions caused by flash crowd traffic in 5G networks. First, a hybrid distribution and three kinds of flash crowd traffic are developed in this framework. Second, we propose a prediction scheme and an operation control scheme to solve the deployment problem of drone cells according to the information collected from the sensor network. Third, the software-defined networking technology is employed to seamlessly integrate and disintegrate drone cells by reconfiguring the network. Our experimental results have shown that the proposed framework can effectively address the overload caused by flash crowd traffic.