Traffic-aware resource management in heterogeneous cellular networks

Due to a rapid progress in mobile cellular networks and increasing demand for diverse mobile services, lots of researchers have focused on how to efficiently integrate multiple heterogeneous sub-systems into the next-generation network. Since the channel is the most critical resource in the cellular network and how to allocate and de-allocate the channels has great impact on the system performance, resource management in heterogeneous cellular networks is an important issue. In this paper, we propose a traffic-aware resource management scheme based on the traffic pattern and the penalty function to maximize the system utilization and the revenue for the system provider. There are two main components - the resource management module and the online traffic monitor module - in our approach. The resource management module can adaptively control all resources in the same cell rather than separately manage the resource on each base station. Specifically, the whole resource on 2G and 3G base stations is partitioned to multiple sub-pools, which are reserved for each specific traffic class. The size of each sub-pool is dynamically adjusted according to the traffic load. The online traffic monitor module is used to trace online traffic condition so as to react the network change. The results of performance evaluation show that our approach can achieve significant improvement in terms of resource utilization and system revenue.