Managing Radio and Energy Resources in LTE-Based Military Training Networks

Abstract: The number of wireless connected devices are growing exponentially and the importance of this research area is growing as well to meet the known and looming challenges and expectations. The 5:th Generation telecommunications standard is partly embodied by the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and standards to handle a big part of these devices and connections. An example within the IoT paradigm is military training systems where each system can consist of thousands of battery operated mobile devices and their shifting requirements shall be fullled in an energy-aware manner to increase battery operating times.Military training radio networks enables realistic combat training. The services and features provided in commercial telecommunications networks are desirable in these often proprietary and task specic networks, increasing capabilities and functionalities. To facilitate the current and future R&D of LTE based networks for adoption in military training networks and services this doctoral thesis intends to provide the starting ground for the energy-aware LTE based wireless communications. The thesis first presents general solutions on how to meet traffic deadlines in wireless networks for large number of nodes, and then continues with solutions for energy-aware LTE-based communications for the User Equipments (UEs).The work builds on the problem formulation how to provide energy-aware resource handling for LTE-based military training networks from where three research questions are derived. From the research questions we derive different hypotheses and then test these within the investigated area to answer the research questions.The contributions of this work are within areas of resource handling and power saving for mobile devices. In the first area an admission control using deterministic analysis is proposed fullling traffic requirements for military training mobile nodes. This admission control is enhanced for multiple-channel base stations, and evaluated using mobile nodes with different heterogeneous traffic requirements. In the second part energy-awareness is in focus for LTE/LTE-A based networks. The main power saving method for LTE/LTE-A UEs, Discontinuous Reception (DRX) mechanism, is evaluated and models for DRX in Idle and Connected state are proposed including metrics for wake-up delay and power saving. Additionally a mean queuing delay analysis is proposed for a variant of the Connected state DRX. Using these models and metrics, practical design guidelines for tuning of DRX parameters are proposed, including optimization of DRX parameters for either minimizing delay or maximizing power saving.