Demand responsive resource management for cellular networks : link asymmetry, pricing and multihopping (2005)

Economic affordability of services and infrastructures has rapidly become one of the key issues in the evaluation and design of wireless access systems. The provisioning of high data rates, at an ``affordable'' price, constitutes a serious challenge to the structure and management of current and future wireless networks. The management of radio resources, Radio Resource Management or RRM for short, has traditionally been benchmarked mostly by technical merits such as throughput (data delivery capability) and Quality of Service (QoS). When comparing different RRM schemes, the scheme that can deliver more bits per Hertz (unit of bandwidth) or per Euro is often assumed the more efficient. From an economic point of view, however, cost efficiency is not equivalent to profitability. We conjecture that the economic efficiency and profitability can be improved both by better technical efficiency and by better accounting for users' service appreciation and willingness to pay. While we shall, primarily treat the operator's benefit of improved RRM, we will try to improve the RRM by means of being more responsive to the demands of the users. In eight conference and journal papers, we investigate: Provisioning of support for asymmetric traffic, Quality and pricing aware resource management and Creation of forwarding incentive in multihop cellular networks. We show that implementing support for asymmetric links can improve the efficiency of (service) production in Time Division Duplexing (TDD) mode wireless networks with asymmetric traffic. That is, more traffic can be handled with the same system resources. Compared to Frequency Division Duplexing (FDD), TDD offers more flexible use of spectrum resources. The benefits of TDD and support for asymmetric links are readily available for systems providing high-rate spotty coverage. For systems aiming at full coverage and tight reuse, however, proper measures must be taken to control inter-mobile- and inter-base-station-interference. We present the MEDUSA model framework for taking users' service appreciation and willingness to pay into account in performance evaluations of wireless networks with elastic traffic. Assuming that user satisfaction depends on both the quality and the price of the service, numerical experiments show that the economic efficiency of an RRM scheme is affected by the pricing scheme. We also introduce the concepts of speculative resource management to exploit traffic elasticity and improve resource utilisation. With speculative admission control, users with good propagation conditions may be admitted to a full system at the expense of a slight degradation of the QoS of some or all users, if the expected total revenue would thereby increase. Results indicate significant revenue gain with speculative admission control. Service perception aware scheduling was evaluated as a means to improve resource utilisation, but yielded only marginal gain compared to a weighted proportional fair scheduler. For the third area studied in this Thesis, i.e. multihopping in cellular networks, economic efficiency was both the goal and one of the means to achieve it. By means of a resource re-distribution scheme called Resource Delegation we eliminated the bandwidth bottle neck of the relays. We combined Resource Delegation with economic compensation for the energy expenditures of the relays and were able to achieve significantly increased operator revenue with maintained or improved user utility. Assuming that the added complexity of keeping track of reward transactions is negligible, profitability was correspondingly improved.