Radio Resource Allocation and Utilization in Multiple Radio Access Networks

Sammanfattning: Meeting in a sustainable way the demands of an unprecedented explosive growth in the number of connected devices and mobile data traffic, next-generation mobile networks are expected to make flexible use of spectrum and provide higher capacity by a denser deployment of radio access network infrastructure. In addition, the allocation and the utilisation of radio access resources should improve spectrum usage efficiency and keep energy consumption low, implying the capability to effectively exploit the denser deployment of radio accesses and the co-existence of radio accesses belonging to one or multiple radio access technologies. The term radio access (RA) is used to denote the radio resources associated with a frequency carrier that can be allocated to one or multiple users for their data transmissions.In a network consisting of multiple radio accesses, improvements in spectral and energy efficiency can be achieved when either channel gains are increased or interference is eliminated or both. There are at least three possible approaches to improve performance, namely, (i) by opportunistically utilizing channel conditions of multiple radio accesses, (ii) by mitigating interference across and within radio accesses, and (iii) by redistributing traffic load among radio accesses. In this work, four different technical solutions for downlink transmissions have been studied and evaluated with respect to throughput, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency performance: (a) multi-access transmit diversity, which refers to the dynamic selection of multiple radio accesses for the transmission of a user’s data, (b) inter-cell interference coordination, which mitigates interference by dividing radio access bandwidth among neighbouring nodes, (c) power on/off of access nodes, which mitigates interference by switching off radio accesses of interfering neighbouring nodes, and (d) radio access load balancing, which effectively distributes load by associating users to radio accesses where the expected rate is higher. For the implementation of the technical solutions different algorithms have been devised and their performance have been evaluated for different user distribution scenarios and different heterogeneous multi-radio access networks deployments consisting of at least a tier of macro-cellular and/or a tier of pico-cells of different densities.The technical solutions are combined into a framework for the allocation and utilisation of radio access resources in heterogeneous multi-radio access dense networks. The framework consists of two subsequent steps: (1) a step solving the multi-radio allocation problem which associates users with a single or multiple radio accesses in the network on the basis of the expected data rates, and (2) a step solving the multi-radio utilisation problem that determines which of the associated radio access(s) should be used at any time for the user data transmissions in the downlink on the basis of the expected instantaneous data rate. To solve the first problem, we employ the flexible spectrum access solution that performs load balancing by associating users to multiple radio accesses while keeping radio accesses without users switched off. For the second problem, we utilise different multi-radio transmit diversity schemes while taking into account different forms of static inter-cell interference coordination. The evaluation of our framework, which is performed by means of simulations, demonstrates significant performance improvements in terms of user throughput, cell-edge throughput, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency.