Radio versus backhaul bottlenecks: an integrated quality of service provisioning approach for small cell gateways

Abstract

SUMMARYSmall cell traffic is expected to experience a continuous increase during the upcoming years, and thus, backhauling challenges should be timely addressed. Regardless the fact that radio resource management continues to be a major research problem in coexisting heterogeneous wireless networks, a mentality shift is observed in the research community towards dealing with wired backhaul bottleneck situations, too. Hence, specific small cell network deployments such as the one considered in this paper have to adopt an integrated quality of service provisioning approach. A femtocell utilizing an existing internet protocol (IP) infrastructure has usually to share the backhaul capacity with several IP networks. As these networks do not provide an efficient admission control process, the capacity allocated to the femtocell can fluctuate unpredictably over time. As a remedy, we propose a scheme for small cells' efficient integration (SCEI) in the IP infrastructure. SCEI is able to manage the total incoming traffic load and continuously adjust the distribution of the backhaul capacity among the existing networks. Simulation results show that SCEI provides significantly higher utilization of the backhaul capacity and more resilience regarding quality‐of‐service‐related metrics in overload state situations compared with state‐of‐the‐art hybrid partitioning techniques. Finally, this work also provides hints on ways that SCEI concepts can be applicable in more future Internet and small cell network deployment variants. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.