Title: "Network architectures and protocols for future mobile communication systems – A user perspective"
Supervisor:
Associate Professor Henrik Lehrmann Christiansen, DTU Fotonik
Evaluation Board:
Associate Professor Michael S. Berger, DTU Fotonik
Associate Professor Qi Zhang, Aarhus University
Research Engineer Berna Sayrac, Orange labs, France
Master of the Ceremony:
Associate Professor Anders Clausen, DTU Fotonik
Abstract:
Mobile networks are of critical importance for our society and its functioning. The path to the next generation of mobile networks depicts systems that are dense, heterogeneous and make use of advanced and sophisticated technologies. These denser and more diverse networks pose challenges in terms of the lack of flexibility in allocating dynamically the large capacity provided, ensuring efficient access to popular user content, the costs needed to manage them and the power required to run them.
Centralisation of functionalities, distribution of content and adaptive and intelligent automation are considered key technologies to address these challenges. They provide the technological framework within which the design and dimensioning of future mobile networks can be carried out.
This process of designing and dimensioning mobile networks is traditionally done from the point of view of a target in terms of capacity and coverage that the system should provide. In such complex systems, it is also beneficial to complement this criterion with the dimensioning from the point of view of the performances of the user applications that are running in such networks.
In this thesis, these key technologies will be presented, together with a set of research methods that have been developed to perform investigations in the role that these technologies will have in addressing some of the core challenges of future mobile networks. It will be pointed out how, when taking the perspective of the performances of the user applications, a set of diverse and complex methods are needed, namely network, protocol and link modelling and simulation, as well as realistic system testbeds.
The resulting picture for designing and dimensioning future mobile networks shows a heterogeneous system, with different types of base stations, a blend of distributed and centralised sites, the integration with edge caches for fast access to user content and finally a power saving solution that keeps into account the performances of the applications when putting base stations to sleep.