Heterogeneous Wireless Access Networks

Heterogeneous wireless networking, which is sometimes referred to as the fourth-generation (4G) wireless, is a new frontier in the future wireless communications technology and there has been a growing interest on this topic among researchers and engineers in both academia and industry. This book will include a set of research and survey articles featuring the recent advances in theory and applications of heterogeneous wireless networking technology for the next generation (e.g., fourth generation) wireless communications systems. With the rapid growth in the number of wireless applications, services and devices, using a single wireless technology such as a second generation (2G) and third generation (3G) wireless system would not be efficient to deliver high speed data rate and quality-of-service (QoS) support to mobile users in a seamless way. Fourth generation (4G) wireless systems are devised with the vision of heterogeneity in which a mobile user/device will be able to connect to multiple wireless networks (e.g., WLAN, cellular, WMAN) simultaneously. This book intends to provide a unified view on the state-of-the-art of protocols and architectures for heterogeneous wireless networking. The contributed articles will cover both the theoretical concepts and system-level implementation issues related to design, analysis, and optimization of architectures and protocols for heterogeneous wireless access networks.

Heterogeneous wireless networking, which is sometimes referred to as the fourth-generation (4G) wireless, is a new frontier in the future wireless communications technology and there has been a growing interest on this topic among researchers and engineers in both academia and industry. This book will include a set of research and survey articles featuring the recent advances in theory and applications of heterogeneous wireless networking technology for the next generation (e.g., fourth generation) wireless communications systems. With the rapid growth in the number of wireless applications, services and devices, using a single wireless technology such as a second generation (2G) and third generation (3G) wireless system would not be efficient to deliver high speed data rate and quality-of-service (QoS) support to mobile users in a seamless way. Fourth generation (4G) wireless systems are devised with the vision of heterogeneity in which a mobile user/device will be able to connect to multiple wireless networks (e.g., WLAN, cellular, WMAN) simultaneously. This book intends to provide a unified view on the state-of-the-art of protocols and architectures for heterogeneous wireless networking. The contributed articles will cover both the theoretical concepts and system-level implementation issues related to design, analysis, and optimization of architectures and protocols for heterogeneous wireless access networks.

With the growing popularity of wireless networks in recent years, the need to increase network capacity and efficiency has become more prominent in society. This has led to the development and implementation of heterogeneous networks. Resource Allocation in Next-Generation Broadband Wireless Access Networks is a comprehensive reference source for the latest scholarly research on upcoming 5G technologies for next generation mobile networks, examining the various features, solutions, and challenges associated with such advances. Highlighting relevant coverage across topics such as energy efficiency, user support, and adaptive multimedia services, this book is ideally designed for academics, professionals, graduate students, and professionals interested in novel research for wireless innovations.

This brief focuses on radio resource allocation in a heterogeneous wireless medium. It presents radio resource allocation algorithms with decentralized implementation, which support both single-network and multi-homing services. The brief provides a set of cooperative networking algorithms, which rely on the concepts of short-term call traffic load prediction, network cooperation, convex optimization, and decomposition theory. In the proposed solutions, mobile terminals play an active role in the resource allocation operation, instead of their traditional role as passive service recipients in the networking environment.

This brief provides an overview of the requirements, challenges, design issues and major techniques for seamless and secure communications over heterogeneous wireless networks. It summarizes and provides detailed insights into the latest research on handoff management, mobility management, fast authentication and security management to support seamless and secure roaming for mobile clients. The reader will also learn about the challenges in developing relevant technologies and providing ubiquitous Internet access over heterogeneous wireless networks. The authors have extensive experience in implementing such technologies over heterogeneous wireless networks, thus enabling them to bridge the gap between the theoretical results of research and the real practice. Combining basic theoretical concepts and practical implementation, this brief is ideal for professionals and researchers in the field. Advanced-level students interested in computer communication networks and wireless technologies will also find the content helpful.

This book provides an in-depth discussion on how to efficiently manage resources of heterogeneous wireless networks and how to design resource allocation algorithms to suit real world conditions. Efficiently managing resources of the networks is more crucial now, than ever before, to meet users’ rapidly increasing demand for higher data rates, better quality-of-service (QoS) and seamless coverage. Some of the techniques that can be incorporated within heterogeneous wireless networks to achieve this objective are interworking of the networks, user multi-homing and device-to-device (D2D) communication. Designing resource allocation algorithms to suit real world conditions is also important, as the algorithms should be deployable and perform well in real networks. For example, two of the conditions considered in this book are resource allocation intervals of different networks are different and small cell base stations have limited computational capacity. To address the first condition, resource allocation algorithms for interworking systems are designed to allocate resources of different networks at different time-scales. To address the second condition, resource allocation algorithms are designed to be able to run at cloud computing servers. More of such conditions, algorithms designed to suit these conditions, modeling techniques for various networks and performance analysis of the algorithms are discussed in the book. This book concludes with a discussion on the future research directions on the related fields of study. Advanced-level students focused on communication and networking will use this book as a study guide. Researchers and experts in the fields of networking, converged networks, small-cell networks, resource management, and interference management, as well as consultants working in network planning and optimization and managers, executives and network architects working in the networking industry will also find this book useful as a reference.

This book focuses on the emerging research topic "green (energy efficient) wireless networks" which has drawn huge attention recently from both academia and industry. This topic is highly motivated due to important environmental, financial, and quality-of-experience (QoE) considerations. Specifically, the high energy consumption of the wireless networks manifests in approximately 2% of all CO2 emissions worldwide. This book presents the authors’ visions and solutions for deployment of energy efficient (green) heterogeneous wireless communication networks. The book consists of three major parts. The first part provides an introduction to the "green networks" concept, the second part targets the green multi-homing resource allocation problem, and the third chapter presents a novel deployment of device-to-device (D2D) communications and its successful integration in Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets). The book is novel in that it specifically targets green networking in a heterogeneous wireless medium, which represents the current and future wireless communication medium faced by the existing and next generation communication networks. The book focuses on multi-homing resource allocation, exploiting network cooperation, and integrating different and new network technologies (radio frequency and VLC), expanding the network coverage and integrating new device centric communication paradigms such as D2D Communications. Whilst the book discusses a significant research topic supported with advanced mathematical analysis, the resulting algorithms and solutions are explained and summarized in a way that is easy to follow and grasp. This book is suitable for networking and telecommunications engineers, researchers in industry and academia, as well as students and instructors.

This book, one of the first of its kind, presents mechanisms, protocols, and system architectures needed to attain end-to-end Quality of Service over heterogeneous wired and wireless networks in the Internet.