Explosion Of Mobile Data Research Articles

Design and Implementation [Series Editorial

This issue presents two papers related to different aspects of application servers in communication networks. Traditional communication system hardware and software architectures were based on resource intensive implementations that separated the control and data planes, and were built using special-purpose ASICs and hardware platforms, and proprietary operating systems. The ongoing miniaturization of communication systems, driven particularly by the demands placed by the explosion of wireless mobile data, requires new paradigms to reduce cost, size, and power while increasing capacity and scalability.

D3M: Multicast listener mobility support mechanisms over distributed mobility anchoring architectures

The explosion in mobile data traffic is a driver for future network operator technologies, given its large potential to affect both network performance and generated revenue. The concept of distributed mobility management (DMM) has emerged in order to overcome efficiency-wise limitations in centralized mobility approaches, proposing not only the distribution of anchoring functions but also dynamic mobility activation sensitive to the applications needs. Nevertheless, there is not an acceptable solution for IP multicast in DMM environments, as the first proposals based on MLD Proxy are prone to tunnel replication problem or service disruption.We propose the application of PIM-SM in mobility entities as an alternative solution for multicast support in DMM, and introduce an architecture enabling mobile multicast listeners support over distributed anchoring frameworks in a network-efficient way. The architecture aims at providing operators with flexible options to provide multicast mobility, supporting three modes: the first one introduces basic IP multicast support in DMM; the second improves subscription time through extensions to the mobility protocol, obliterating the dependence on MLD protocol; and the third enables fast listener mobility by avoiding potentially slow multicast tree convergence latency in larger infrastructures, by benefiting from mobility tunnels. The different modes were evaluated by mathematical analysis regarding disruption time and packet loss during handoff against several parameters, total and tunneling packet delivery cost, and regarding packet and signaling overhead.

Distributed mobility management for future 5G networks: overview and analysis of existing approaches

The ever-increasing demand of mobile Internet traffic is pushing operators to look for solutions to increase the available bandwidth per user and per unit of area. At the same time, they need to reduce the load in the core network at a reasonable cost in their future 5G deployments. Today's trend points to the deployment of extremely dense networks in order to provide ubiquitous connectivity at high data rates. However, this is hard to couple with the current mobile networks' architecture, which is heavily centralized, posing difficult challenges when coping with the foreseen explosion of mobile data. Additionally, future 5G networks will exhibit disparate types of services, posing different connectivity requirements. Distributed mobility management is emerging as a valid framework to design future mobile network architectures, taking into account the requirements for large traffic in the core and the rise of extremely dense wireless access networks. In this article, we discuss the adoption of a distributed mobility management approach for mobile networks, and analyze the operation of the main existing solutions proposed so far, including a first practical evaluation based on experiments with real Linux-based prototype implementations.

CONCERT: a cloud-based architecture for next-generation cellular systems

Cellular networks are one of the corner stones of our information-driven society. However, existing cellular systems have been seriously challenged by the explosion of mobile data traffic, the emergence of machine-type communications and the flourish of mobile Internet services. In this article, we propose CONCERT (CONvergence of Cloud and cEllulaR sysTems), a converged edge infrastructure for future cellular communications and mobile computing services. The proposed architecture is constructed based on the concept of control/data (C/D) plane decoupling. The data plane includes heterogeneous physical resources such as radio interfacing equipment, computational resources, and software-defined switches. The control plane jointly coordinates physical resources to present them as virtual resources, over which software-defined services including communications, computing, and management can be deployed in a flexible manner. Moreover, we introduce new designs for physical resources placement and task scheduling, so that CONCERT can overcome the drawbacks of the existing baseband-up centralization approach and better facilitate innovations in next-generation cellular networks. These advantages are demonstrated with application examples on the radio access networks (RANs) with C/D decoupled air interface, delay sensitive machine-type communications, and real-time mobile cloud gaming. We also discuss some fundamental research issues arising with the proposed architecture to illuminate future research directions.

Fiber-Wireless (FiWi) Broadband Access Networks in an Age of Convergence: Past, Present, and Future

After describing the beginnings and state of the art of integrated fiber-wireless (FiWi) broadband access networks in great detail, we briefly review recent progress and point to various ongoing research activities, including the design of energy-efficient “green” FiWi access networks, advanced survivability techniques, and integration of wireless and fiber optic sensors, towards realizing adaptable, dependable, and ecoconscious future-proof broadband access networks based on both wireless and shared passive fiber media. Furthermore, we discuss service, application, business, and operation related aspects, which motivate access technology to move into a substantially different direction in the long run than continued capacity provisioning. Given that most 4G cellular mobile network researches so far have been focusing on the achievable performance gains in the wireless front-end only without looking into the details of backhaul implementations and possible backhaul bottlenecks, we identify open key research challenges for FiWi broadband access networks. We explore ways of how they can be deployed across relevant economic sectors other than telecommunications per se, taking major paradigm shifts such as the Third Industrial Revolution, Energy Internet, smart grid, and explosion of mobile data traffic in today’s cellular networks into account.

Q-Band Millimeter-Wave Antennas: An Enabling Technology for MultiGigabit Wireless Backhaul

The bandwidth demands in mobile communication systems are growing exponentially day by day as the number of users has increased drastically over the last five years. This mobile data explosion, together with the fixed service limitations, requires a new approach to support this increase in bandwidth demand. Solutions based on lower-frequency microwave wireless systems may be able to meet the bandwidth demand in a short term. However, with the small-cell mass deployment requiring total capacities of 1 Gb/s/km2, scalable, multigigabit backhaul systems are required. Millimeter-wave technology fits nicely into these new backhaul scenarios as it provides extended bandwidth for high-capacity links and adaptive throughput rate, which allows efficient and flexible deployment. Besides these advantages, millimeter-wave solutions become even more attractive when the cost of backhaul solutions and the cost of spectrum licenses are factored in. Compared to the cost of laying fiber to a cell base station, which is the only other scalable solution, the millimeter-wave solution becomes the most appropriate approach.

The Escape of Sisyphus or What “Post NG-PON2” Should Do Apart from Neverending Capacity Upgrades

The primary design goal of (r)evolutionary NG-PON1&2 was the provisioning of an ever increasing capacity to cope with video-dominated traffic and handle the explosion of mobile data traffic by means of offloading. Recently, however, questions on the future of “post NG-PON2” have surfaced whether to shift its research focus to business and operation related aspects and move access technology into a substantially different direction than continued capacity upgrades. In fact, recent studies indicate that ultimately the major factor limiting the performance of 4G mobile networks is latency rather than capacity of the backhaul. In this paper, we review recently proposed low-latency techniques for NG-PONs that require architectural modifications at the remote node or distribution fiber level and highlight advanced network coding and real-time polling based low-latency techniques that can be implemented in software, enable NG-PONs to carry higher traffic loads and thereby extend their lifetime, and maintain the passive nature of existent optical distribution networks. Furthermore, we elaborate on emerging trends and open challenges for future post NG-PON2 research. To better understand their true potential, we put them into a wider non-technical and historical perspective leading up to a sustainable Third Industrial Revolution (TIR) economy and its underlying Energy Internet.

Economics of WiFi Offloading: Trading Delay for Cellular Capacity

Cellular networks are facing severe traffic overloads due to the proliferation of smart handheld devices and traffic-hungry applications. A cost-effective and practical solution is to offload cellular data through WiFi. Recent theoretical and experimental studies show that a scheme, referred to as delayed WiFi offloading, can significantly save the cellular capacity by delaying users' data and exploiting mobility and thus increasing chance of meeting WiFi APs (Access Points). Despite a huge potential of WiFi offloading in alleviating mobile data explosion, its success largely depends on the economic incentives provided to users and operators to deploy and use delayed offloading. In this paper, we study how much economic benefits can be generated due to delayed WiFi offloading, by modeling the interaction between a single provider and users based on a two-stage sequential game. We first analytically prove that WiFi offloading is economically beneficial for both the provider and users. Also, we conduct trace-driven numerical analysis to quantify the practical gain, where the increase ranges from 21% to 152% in the providers revenue, and from 73% to 319% in the users surplus.

Aspiration Level-Based Strategy Dynamics on the Coexistence of Spectrum Cooperation and Leasing

As an emerging approach in alleviating mobile data explosion, cognitive radio is adopted with diverse network models to promote wireless spectrum sharing between primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs). However, owing to PUs' priority, SUs may have to suspend their transmission before it is finished. Therefore, this letter considers the coexistence of cooperative cognitive radio networks and spectrum leasing markets which can offer SUs fixed transmission opportunity for their transmission. By adopting aspiration level to model SUs' behavior, we formulate SUs' strategy dynamics as a Discrete Time Markov Chain and illustrate the existence of stable state of the system under different cases through preliminary results.

Vehicular WiFi offloading: Challenges and solutions

WiFi offloading is envisioned as a promising solution to the mobile data explosion problem in cellular networks. WiFi offloading for moving vehicles, however, poses unique characteristics and challenges, due to high mobility, fluctuating mobile channels, etc. In this paper, we focus on the problem of WiFi offloading in vehicular communication environments. Specifically, we discuss the challenges and identify the research issues related to drive-thru Internet access and effectiveness of vehicular WiFi offloading. Moreover, we review the state-of-the-art offloading solutions, in which advanced vehicular communications can be employed. We also shed some lights on the path for future research on this topic.

Macro and small cell/Wi-Fi networks: An analysis of deployment options as the solution for the mobile data explosion

With the tremendous growth in mobile data traffic triggered by increases in data subscriptions, powerful devices, and richer applications, operators are seeing Wi-Fi as not only a complementary technology to offload cellular data traffic but also as a seamless extension of their mobile networks. The advent of Hotspot 2.0, enhanced Wi-Fi quality of service (QoS) techniques, and transparent authentication mechanisms between mobile and Wi-Fi networks will pave the way for seamless mobility and roaming between these two technologies and provide a better quality of experience to the end user. With web-based applications like Skype, Google Talk, and WhatsApp becoming mainstream media for communication, operators are looking at the combination of licensed band and Wi-Fi technologies to meet capacity demands. This paper discusses the evolution of basic network Wi-Fi -based hotspots to become the trusted partner of mobile operators. We present architectures and required features for data offload and seamless mobility and provide an in-depth techno-economic analysis comparing various deployment alternatives for data offload in a heterogeneous network.

Mobile data explosion: Monetizing the opportunity through dynamic policies and Qos pipes

With the recent explosion of mobile data traffic, it is becoming clear that “unlimited” data usage plans are financially unsustainable. In order to wean subscribers away from these plans without serious customer dissatisfaction, there is a need to create data plans at different price levels, consistently with subscriber needs for data volume, quality of experience, and usage characteristics. The technical and financial challenges of implementing such plans are multi-faceted—the impact of outdated network equipment, legacy handsets, and over-the-top applications all contribute to additional network costs, which need to be minimized. In this paper, we introduce an analytical model to investigate the economic impact of incentivizing off-peak capacity usage—since network cost is driven by peak capacity, reduction of peak demand brings corresponding cost savings. We then present policy and quality of service (QoS) mechanisms to implement traffic shaping with off-peak usage incentives, so that operators can manage and monetize the explosion of mobile data.