Improving relay based cellular networks performance in highly user congested and emergency situations

Abstract

Relay based cellular networks (RBCNs) are the technologies that incorporate multi-hop communication into traditional cellular networks. A RBCN can potentially support higher data rates, more stable radio coverage and more dynamic services. In reality, RBCNs still suffer from performance degradation in terms of high user congestion, base station failure and overloading in emergency situations. The focus of this thesis is to explore the potential to improve IEEE802.16j supported RBCN performance in user congestion and emergency situations using adjustments to the RF layer (by antenna adjustments or extensions using multi-hop) and cooperative adjustment algorithms, e.g. based on controlling frequency allocation centrally and using distributed approaches. The first part of this thesis designs and validates network reconfiguration algorithms for RBCN, including a cooperative antenna power control algorithm and a heuristic antenna tilting algorithm. The second part of this thesis investigates centralized and distributed dynamic frequency allocation for higher RBCN frequency efficiency, network resilience, and computation simplicity. It is demonstrated that these benefits mitigate user congestion and base station failure problems significantly. Additionally, interweaving coordinated dynamic frequency allocation and antenna tilting is investigated in order to obtain the benefits of both actions. The third part of this thesis incorporates Delay Tolerate Networking (DTN) technology into RBCN to let users self-organize to connect to functional base station through multi-hops supported by other users. Through the use of DTN, RBCN coverage and performance are improved. This thesis explores the augmentation of DTN routing protocols to let more un-covered users connect to base stations and improve network load balancing