Congestion Identification in a Radio Access Transport Network

Sammanfattning: The convergence of mobile services and Internet has brought a radical change in mobile networks. An all IP network architecture, an evolution of the radio access transport network, is required to support new high-bandwidth services. Unfortunately, existing control mechanisms are insufficient to guarantee end users a high quality of experience. However, coordinating radio and transport network resources is expected to yield a more efficient solution. This thesis project investigates the interactions between the congestion avoidance protocols, explicit congestion notification, and the traffic engineering metrics for latency and bandwidth, when using Open Shortest Path First with traffic engineering (OSPF-TE) as a routing protocol. Using knowledge of these interactions, it is possible to identify the appearance of bottlenecks and to control the congestion in the transport links within a radio access transport network. Augmenting a topology map with the network’s current characteristics and reacting to evidence of potential congestion, further actions, such as handovers can be taken to ensure the users experience their expected quality of experience. The proposed method has been validated in a test bed. The results obtained from experiments and measurements in this test bed provide a clear picture of how the traffic flows in the network. Furthermore, the behavior of the network observed in these experiments, in terms of real-time performance and statistical analysis of metrics over a period of time, shows the efficiency of this proposed solution.