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

Purdue University, West Lafayette IN

Investigators

Abstract

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.