Research On Resource Management For Future Wireless Networks

In order to satisfy the exploding increase of mobile traffic in these years, various wireless networks have been deployed in a large-scale and ultra-dense way.Improvement of resource utilization and conserving energy consumption are the key issues for keeping the fast development of wireless networks. Toward trends and requirements of future wireless networks, this dissertation firstly designs a flexible SDN+ framework for network resource management. In addition, this dissertation studies on two important kinds of resource management: spectrum management and device management, which are aiming at improving efficiency of resource utilization and conserving energy respectively.1. This dissertation designs a SDN+ framework for managing resources. By adopting the idea of software-defined network(SDN), the framework provides flexibility for resource management of wireless networks and wired backhaul links.Taking characteristics of wireless devices into consideration, SDN's control plane and data plane are extended. The uniform control plane is responsible for controlling both wired and wireless network devices. In addition, control plane can coordinate some behaviors of terminals. Data plane of wireless devices is abstracted into 5 kinds of actions including frequency-domain, time-domain, coding-domain, spatial-domain, and power-domain actions. By defining the 5 kinds of actions, spectrum resource can be shared by different networks; in addition, wireless resources and wired resources can be scheduled uniformly, which provides a basis for integrated resource management.2. Co-channel interference is one of the main reasons resulting in inefficient spectrum utilization. This dissertation investigates spectrum management for wireless infrastructure. Firstly, within a network use channels of fixed width, a conflict-area based channel assignment scheme is proposed, which allocates spectrum of fixed width for wireless infrastructure aiming at reducing interference. Then, within a network can use dynamic spectrum, a load-aware spectrum allocation scheme is brought out. By considering channel width's influence on interference, this scheme allocates spectrum of various widths on-demand and reduce interference at the same time. At last,considering limitation of resources on wired links, a load balancing mechanism isdesigned which takes both spectrum resource and wired link resource into account for optimizing resource utilization and network performance. If the load balancing process changes load distribution which results in mismatch of load and spectrum, the spectrum allocation process will be carried out.3. This dissertation conducts research on management of device resource in order to conserve energy consumption. Firstly, some measurements are carried out and energy consumption characteristics of wireless networks are analyzed which can provide some hints for energy conservation work. Then, in order to save energy, a method of device resource management is designed for dense wireless networks. The management method includes two processes: AP powering-off mechanism and AP powering-on algorithm. Provided that signal coverage and network performance are maintained, the management method adjusts device resource, so that network capacity dynamically adapts with user demands. Therefore, it can save energy consumption and guarantee network performance at the same time.