Multi-technology Management of Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

Abstract

Wireless networks are ubiquitous in today's world and consist of an ever-expanding number of heterogeneous consumer devices and communication technologies. As modern devices support multiple communication technologies, efforts have been made to efficiently manage this plethora of technologies by supporting functionalities such as simultaneous usage or handovers.However, existing solutions are missing both the fine-grained control and intelligence to offer seamless inter-technology management and network optimizations. As a result, technologies operate in an isolated manner, network management is inefficient, and the requirements of users and modern applications are not being met. In contrast, we present intelligent and dynamic multi-technology network management that breaks this isolation, abstracting the connectivity decisions from the user and application level. Different contributions are made: first of all, we introduce a framework for inter-technology management that enables, among others, seamless handovers and packet-based load balancing. Next, we propose different algorithms that can be deployed on top of the novel, or existing, management solutions to increase the network-wide throughput by providing more intelligent network configurations, taking into account mobility and real-time requirements. Finally, as management approaches rely on an accurate overview of the network state, we also consider the monitoring aspect and investigate the detection of traffic patterns in the radio spectrum. Our contributions are evaluated through practical implementations in real-life prototypes.