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Capturing Spatial Randomness of Heterogeneous Cellular/WLAN Deployments With Dynamic Traffic
As fourth generation communications technology is
already being deployed, research efforts are now being shifted to
what comes beyond state-of-the-art wireless systems. Driven by the
anticipated acceleration in mobile traffic demand, the wireless industry
is specifically focused on improving capacity and coverage
of current networks through aggressive reuse of the cellular spectrum.
Together with deploying an increasingly dense overlay tier
of smaller cells, mobile network operators are beginning to rely on
unlicensed-band WLAN technologies to leverage additional spectrum
and relieve congestion on their networks. Consequently, the
emerging vision of heterogeneous networks exploits the potential
of a diverse range of devices requiring connectivity at different
scales to augment available system capacity and improve the user
connectivity experience. In this paper, we seek to meet this important
trend with our novel integrated methodology for assisted
(managed) radio network selection capturing spatial randomness
of converged cellular/WLAN deployments together with dynamic
uplink traffic fromtheir users. To this end, we employ tools coming
from stochastic geometry to characterize performance of macro
and pico cellular networks, as well as WLAN, mindful of user
experience and targeting intelligent network selection/assignment.
We complement our analysis with system-level simulations providing
deeper insights into the behavior of future heterogeneous
deployments.