A Study of Achieving Seamless Handover and Cell Power Saving in Small Cell Networks: Using SDN Solutions

In the 5th generation communication networks, the type of base station (BS) mainly changes from macro cell BS to the small cell BS in order to provide high speed and high bandwidth access services. Under the small cell BS network architecture, small cell BSs have to be smarter to overcome the accompanying problems of higher interference among user equipments (UEs) and small cell BSs as well as the frequent handover requests among UEs. Recently, the 3GPP committee formed a working group to investigate the possibility of improving the performance of LTE-A/EPC (Evolved Packet Core) by using the software-defined networking (SDN) technology. According to the trend of SDN developing, we propose a two-year project to study the issues of (1) the seamless handover among small cell BSs and (2) the possibility of small cell BS power saving for green communication consideration. In the first year, we design a radio resource allocation and scheduling algorithm based on the OpenFlow technology in SDN. Meanwhile, for the goal of seamless handover among small cell BSs, a novel signal strength feedback mechanism as well as a moving direction prediction mechanism are proposed to achieve this goal. In the second year, we investigate a dynamic transmit power control mechanism of small cell BSs based on the distribution of UEs and BSs to achieve the purpose of green communication. All in all, in the two-year project, we investigate the SDN architecture which separates the software and the PHY for improving the drawbacks caused by adopting the small cell BSs architecture so that the goal of green communication is achieved.

Project ID:PB10408-5741
External Project ID:MOST104-2221-E182-025