NeTS: Small: Collaborative Research: Configuration Management for Mobility Support in Cellular Networks

NeTS：小型：协作研究：蜂窝网络中移动性支持的配置管理

• 批准号: 1526985
• 负责人: Songwu Lu
• 金额: $ 22.98万
• 依托单位: University of California-Los Angeles
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2015
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2015-10-01 至 2019-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1526985&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: NeTS; Small; Collaborative; Research; Configuration

Mobility support is deemed a fundamental service for the next-generation Internet. The current cellular network is the only large-scale infrastructure that successfully provides wide-area, ubiquitous mobility support in reality. With the explosive growth of smartphone devices and the surge of mobile data traffic, cellular networks have been evolving into an increasingly heterogeneous networked system. As a result, managing mobility becomes challenging yet rewarding. This project seeks to study the configuration issues on mobility management of 2G/3G/4G networks, in order to ensure desirable mobility support. The research focuses on assessing two structural properties: stability and reachability. Stability implies no persistent oscillation loops during constant network conditions, while reachability denotes no access black hole (e.g., certain cells or even a given mobile technology (e.g., 4G) cannot be reached by the device). The success of the project will not only identify and characterize misconfigurations in today's cellular networks, but also protect multi-trillion dollar investment in the fast expanding mobile information infrastructure. The obtained results may influence the design of upcoming 5G wireless networks. The proposed research has three key areas of technical contributions. First, it takes a novel approach to configuration study. It models and analyzes problematic cases and comes up with a taxonomy of instability and unreachability for the mobility configuration problems, and derives triggering conditions for each problematic instance. The fundamental problem lies in its distributed, yet not well-coordinated configuration decision-making. Second, the project covers activities from theory to practice. Given the misconfiguration instances discovered in theory, it further empirically assesses them in operational mobile networks. It seeks to measure their likelihood in reality and quantify their negative impacts on both the user device and the network infrastructure. The diversified root causes are to be analyzed, spanning policy conflicts within a single parameter, inconsistency between different types of parameters, and uncoordinated decisions between the device and the network. Last, the research proposes new solutions to configuration management in mobile networks. This research simplifies the current approach, while retaining its full configurability for parameters. To this end, two design guidelines of minimal replication of decision rules and no multi-hop mobility decision are explored in order to ensure both stability and reachability of mobility support.

移动支持被认为是下一代互联网的基本服务。当前的蜂窝网络是现实中唯一能够成功提供广域、无处不在的移动性支持的大规模基础设施。随着智能手机设备的爆炸性增长和移动数据流量的激增，蜂窝网络已经演变成日益异构的网络系统。因此，管理流动性变得富有挑战性但又有益。该项目旨在研究2G/3G/4G网络移动性管理的配置问题，以确保提供理想的移动性支持。该研究重点评估两个结构特性：稳定性和可达性。稳定性意味着在恒定的网络条件下没有持续的振荡循环，而可达性则意味着没有接入黑洞（例如，设备无法到达某些小区甚至给定的移动技术（例如，4G））。该项目的成功不仅将识别和描述当今蜂窝网络中的错误配置，还将保护对快速扩展的移动信息基础设施的数万亿美元投资。获得的结果可能会影响即将推出的 5G 无线网络的设计。拟议的研究具有三个关键技术贡献领域。首先，它采用了一种新颖的配置研究方法。它对问题案例进行建模和分析，提出移动配置问题的不稳定性和不可达性分类，并得出每个问题实例的触发条件。 根本问题在于其分布式但协调性差的配置决策。其次，该项目涵盖了从理论到实践的活动。鉴于理论上发现的错误配置实例，它进一步在运营的移动网络中凭经验评估它们。它旨在衡量它们在现实中的可能性，并量化它们对用户设备和网络基础设施的负面影响。需要分析的根本原因多种多样，包括单一参数内的策略冲突、不同类型参数之间的不一致以及设备和网络之间的决策不协调等。最后，该研究提出了移动网络配置管理的新解决方案。这项研究简化了当前的方法，同时保留了其参数的完全可配置性。为此，探索了决策规则最小重复和无多跳移动性决策两种设计准则，以确保移动性支持的稳定性和可达性。