Recency effect and self-regulating design of mobile cellular systems in the context of interlaced generations: network bandwidth, power efficiency, and connection reliability

Abstract

The mobile cellular system is undergoing a generation-interlaced evolution from 2G/3G/4G to 5G, with various signals and protocols coexisting for a long period. A crucial but challenging problem that emerges is how to ensure high performance (fast transmission), high energy efficiency (low power consumption), and high reliability (stable connection) for the services in a large, heterogeneous, and highly dynamic cellular environment. This problem simultaneously involves mobile phone manufacturers, network service providers, and OS/application developers. In this paper, we comprehensively review the representative related works in recent years, and learn that a series of performance anomalies in cellular systems is in fact attributed to the “recency effect" at the core mechanisms. Upon selecting which mobile network to use, there exist generation biases and unconscious performance-first tendencies affected by public opinions and commercial promotions. The biases and tendencies lead to knock-on effects like the “loss-making migration" towards 5G, the “saturated hunger" of network capacity, and the “ping-pong jumping" among base station connections. To overcome the above shortcomings, we propose self-regulating techniques based on 4G/5G dual-connectivity and Time-Inhomogenous Markov Process, which reduce the failure rate of 5G devices by 40% and the average failure duration of all devices by 36%. We also discuss other insights and innovations based on large-scale industrial practice.