Integrated Backhaul Management for Ultra-Dense Network Deployment

Sammanfattning: Mobile data traffic is expected to increase substantially in the coming years, with data rates 1000 times higher by 2020, having media and content as the main drivers together with a plethora of new end-user services that will challenge existing networks. Concepts and visions associated with the ICT evolution like the network society, 50 billion connected devices, Industrial Internet, Tactile Internet, etc., exemplifies the range of new services that the networks will have to handle. These new services impose extreme requirement to the network like high capacity, low latency, reliability, security, seamless connectivity, etc. In order to face these challenges, the whole end-to-end network has to evolve and adapt, pushing for advances in different areas, such as transport, cloud, core, and radio access networks. This work investigates the impact of envisioned 2020 society scenarios on transport links for mobile backhaul, emphasizing the need for an integrated and flexible/adaptive network as the way to meet the 2020 networks demands. The evolution of heterogeneous networks and ultra-dense network deployments shall also comprise the introduction of adaptive network features, such as dynamic network resource allocation, automatic integration of access nodes, etc. In order to achieve such self-management features in mobile networks, new mechanisms have to be investigated for an integrated backhaul management. First, this thesis performs a feasibility study on the mobile backhaul dimensioning for 2020 5G wireless ultra-dense networks scenarios, aiming to analyze the gap in capacity demand between 4G and 5G networks. Secondly, the concept of an integrated backhaul management is analyzed as a combination of node attachment procedures, in the context of moving networks. In addition, the dynamic network resource allocation concept, based on DWDM-centric transport architecture, was explored for 5G scenarios assuming traffic variation both in time and between different geographical areas. Finally, a short view on techno-economics and network deployments in the 2020 time frame is provided.