Cross System Engineering in Next Generation Networks

We present a study on planning and management in 4G networks. The deployment of next generation networks is driven by the proliferation and integration of radio access technologies. This will enable cooperation between access networks based on the reallocation of users across different systems. Inter-system user reallocation will open a new research field: cross system engineering. We break into this ambitious concept with a deep analysis of the impact of inter-system cooperation. The main goal of our study is to measure the cost of serving users that only have CDMA coverage and suffer outage because the cellular system is overloaded. An option to serve these users is to make space for them (in the CDMA network) by reallocating served CDMA users to an overlaid IEEE 802.11-based network. However, this reallocation process has associated costs such as impact on performance and signalling overhead. Thus, care is needed in making space in the cellular network. Our main contribution is the thorough analysis of inter-system user reallocation in 4G networks by simulating different reallocation strategies