Abstract
The predicted increase in mobile data traffic and in the
number of mobile users poses challenges for network
operators. Future mobile networks should support traffic
volumes of several orders of magnitude larger than today.
This may create situations in which the transmission
capacity of the network is inadequate for the traffic
demand. Intelligent and robust network management methods
are thus needed to handle the upcoming changes. Because
quite often the bottleneck lies in the wireless part of
the network, it is essential to have methods in place to
select appropriate wireless access points for the users
or their applications. This can be performed either by a
central entity or in a distributed manner in which the
intelligence is placed in the user equipment or hybrid
combinations of those. The selection criteria may vary
from selfish optimization of a single user's quality of
experience to global network load balancing and
class-wise prioritization. This work explores the
wireless access selection scheme from a system
perspective in scenarios where users of different
subscription classes are using progressive video
streaming. Evaluation is carried out between a Q-learning
based user-centric algorithm, a user class aware
network-centric algorithm and a setting without
handovers. Simulation results show that both user-centric
and network-centric algorithms are able to improve the
network performance and the quality of experience of the
users. The gains of the network-centric algorithm are
more evident during high congestion. In a lightly
congested network, the distributed selfish optimization
is also qualitatively a good solution for gold users.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 242-259 |
Journal | International Journal of Network Management |
Volume | 25 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2015 |
MoE publication type | A1 Journal article-refereed |
Keywords
- wireless access selection
- Q-learning
- load balancing
- network management framework
- video streaming
- simulation