Software-Defined Mobility Management and Base Station Control for Green Cellular Networks
Abstract
Mobile communication systems have revolutionized in order to fulfill exponentially
increasing data traffic volume due to the introduction of new devices such as smartphones
and tablets and success of social networking services. Evolving cellular networks
include emerging technologies such as Software-Defined Network (SDN) and Network
Function Virtualization (NFV). SDN is an emerging network architecture that allows dynamic
and flexible network operations with centralized controller. NFV addresses the
problem of a large and increasing number of hardware appliances and focuses on optimizing
the network services themselves. With SDN and NFV, cellular networks are able
to provide more flexible and agile management that can better align and support the mobile
users.
In this dissertation, we address location management and handover to reduce data
traffic toward the core network and to reduce energy consumption. Location management
is a key control task in cellular network operations. We propose and develop an efficient
group location management scheme as a virtualized network function for group cellular
applications. The performance improvement is mainly achieved by the virtualized and
separate group management architecture and an efficient dynamic group profiling algorithm.
We conduct theoretical analyses of our scheme for signaling costs and performance
gains under diverse traffic conditions. Furthermore, we carry out extensive evaluations using
both real traces and synthetic human mobility data, and we validate the efficiency of
the proposed scheme in both location updates and paging.
Moreover, in order to tackle the issues of mounting deployments and large energy
consumption of base stations, it is integral to devise schemes to improve energy efficiency
in cellular networks. We propose a virtualized network function of cell management on an
SDN architecture. We develop a cell management algorithm on the architecture that can
effectively control the sleep and awake modes of base stations and perform handover
operations in a cellular network. It provides significant benefits over current cellular
networks that suffer from inflexible management and complex control. Our extensive
trace-driven evaluation results show that the proposed control architecture and the cell
management algorithm achieve significant energy savings, and incur less control message
exchanges, more cells in a sleep mode for longer durations, and less cell status changes
than existing energy saving approaches for cellular networks.
Table of Contents
Introduction -- Background -- Related work -- Dynamic location management service -- eNodeB control with SDN and NVF for energy saving -- Summary -- Future work
Degree
Ph.D