Enhanced resource utilization in the evolved packet core network for 4G/LTE mobile broadband services

Abstract

Over the past years, digital communication and telecommunication have played a significant role in people’s life through introducing several innovative services (e.g. video conferencing, online banking, e-Health, etc) that are continuously enhancing the people interaction with the rest of the world. With years to come, the telecommunication industry will gain more importance and more telecom related services will be introduced considering that human, machines, cars, banks, hospitals, and other things will be all connected. The whole world is getting closely connected seeking to serve the human in every detail in this life. Consequently, telecom systems/ networks will be more complicated, require more resources and involve more challenging requirements. The 4G LTE technology (Long Term Evolution) has been introduced and the 5G technology is being planned to ensure that the needed infrastructure/technology is present to meet any requirements of the mobile services. To ensure high performance, throughput and scalability, efficient resource allocation and network optimization are very crucial in all 4G/LTE & 5G communication systems that would help to avoid wasting the resources and ensure service availability and systems/networks efficiency. Considering the improvements introduced in the 4G/LTE radio access and the enhancements planned for the 5G technology, the mobile core network "EPC" (Evolved Packet Core network) should evolve accordingly to cope with the big improvements at the radio access network. Hence, the EPC systems should provide higher throughput and less latency to ensure the end-to-end performance and quality of the newly introduced mobile services. The real-time and conversational LTE services require guaranteed resources to be strictly allocated for the whole lifetime of the service call. The LTE Evolved Packet Core network (EPC) internal design is inadequate with regards to the resources reservation techniques used to carry out the guaranteed dedicated services. In fact, EPC does not have the capabilities to utilize properly the unused bandwidth of the guaranteed bearer when the reserved bandwidth is not fully used by the mobile service. The unused guaranteed bandwidth is considered as wasted resources and consequently the whole LTE/EPC network efficiency gets affected. In this work, we will propose an adaptive technique which enhances the resource reservation for the LTE Mobile guaranteed services. In our research work, we provide techniques to; analyze the ongoing mobile guaranteed traffic usage, provide time-series models that mathematically represent the conducted data, forecast the mobile service guaranteed resource consumption, identify the wasted/unused resources and utilize these resources by other services. Our experiments were conducted on several datasets captured on emulated LTE environment. The experimental results show that our approach is feasible and beneficial as it enhances the resource allocation for the LTE mobile services and increases the overall throughput of the LTE/EPC networks.

Date	2 Jun 2016
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Michel Kadoch (Supervisor)