Neil Scully

Use Cases, Requirements and Assessment Criteria for Future Self-Organising Radio Access Networks

Self-organisation (self-optimisation, self-configuration, and self-healing) methods are a promising concept to automate wireless access network planning, deployment and optimisation. This paper contains a mind setting exercise. First the mechanisms for which self-organisation is anticipated to be effective and feasible are identified. Then technical and non-technical requirements that need to be taken into account for the successful development of self-organisation functionalities are discussed. Furthermore, a set of metrics and appropriate reference cases (benchmarks) are presented, which allow to do on one hand a quantitative comparison of the different algorithms developed for a given use case, and on the other hand to evaluate the gains from self-organisation by comparing self-organisation solutions with the case of manual network operations.

Realistic Indoor Wi-Fi and Femto Deployment Study as the Offloading Solution to LTE Macro Networks

This paper investigates the downlink performance of indoor deployed Wi-Fi and Femto as the offloading solution to the LTE macro cellular networks in a realistic large-scale dense-urban scenario. With an assumed broadband traffic volume growth of 50x compared to todays levels, it is evaluated that a dual-carrier LTE macro network will not be able to provide sufficient service coverage with a 1 Mbps minimum data rate and, indoor coverage is identified as the major bottleneck.. We evaluate the performance of indoor Wi-Fi and Femto cell deployment to offload the congested LTE macro network. We show that, in a dual-carrier LTE macro case with a total of 30 MHz spectrum, Wi-Fi access point density of 230/km2 is required to meet the set target of 90% coverage with a minimum user data rate of 1 Mbps. For the same scenario it was found that an out-band Femto access point density of 1200/km2 is required. Furthermore, we show that in-band Femto cell cannot meet the set network requirement even at a very high access point density. We also show that Wi-Fi and Femto cell can offload the same amount of traffic when they are deployed at the same access point density.

Multi-Layer Mobility Load Balancing in a Heterogeneous LTE Network

This paper analyzes the behavior of a distributed Mobility Load Balancing (MLB) scheme in a multi-layer 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project) Long Term Evolution (LTE) deployment with different User Equipment (UE) densities in certain network areas covered with pico cells. Target of the study is to evaluate MLB in terms of efficient pico cell utilization and macro layer load balancing (LB). The analysis focuses on video streaming traffic due to specific service characteristics (e.g. play-out buffer delay/jitter protection) that might make any mobility performance degradation transparent to the end user performance. Results have shown that the proposed MLB scheme can significantly improve the overall network resources utilization by eliminating potential load imbalances amongst the deployment layers and consequently enhance user experience. However this occurs at the cost of increased Radio Link Failures (RLF), a fact that might be critical for further applying MLB in real-time conversational services without additional mobility optimization and interference management techniques.