Operator and radio resource sharing in multi-carrier environments.

摘要

A key challenge that the mobile networking world is facing is seamless network composition. In spite of a wide range of available access technologies, the operator agreements prevent users to freely access these networks. With seamless network composition, users can gain better quality of service, and operators can provision less bandwidth by sharing their resources. Al-Fares et al. [4] previously proposed a resource reservation framework that implements this network composition concept. We extended their work by analyzing the benefits of operator cooperation in a realistic environment using their framework. In our scenario, we tried to leverage the difference in burstiness in small timescales to shed the peak usage of one operator onto another. We utilize Swing [26] to reproduce traffic based on the real 3G trace data. The results show that even when the operator's capacities are limited, the cooperation can help maintain quality of service for most sessions.;Nevertheless, even if all access technologies can be accessed seamlessly, more challenges appear to be which technology users should use and which combination of access technologies is appropriate to deploy. To provide more insight to these challenges, we investigated the performance delivered by various kinds of wireless technologies. We utilized Swing's abilities to tune the topology parameters to reflect different access technologies. Our results show that WiFi can provide significantly better performance compared to the 3G. On the other hand, we expect the performance of LTE to be comparable to or even better than WiFi.