Mobile network operators a country operate independent of each other, although inter-operator collaboration such as national roaming can offer benefits in terms of resilience, coverage,  throughput, and energy efficiency. In this work, we quantify the benefits in terms of coverage, capacity, and power consumption that can be gained by national roaming as a fallback strategy and as a default strategy wherein all MNOs are operated as a single network. 

With more and more demand from devices to use wireless communication networks, there has been an increased interest in resource sharing among operators, to give a better link quality. However, in the analysis of the benefits of resource sharing among these operators, the important factor of co-location is often overlooked. Indeed, often in wireless communication networks, different operators co-locate: they place their base stations at the same locations due to cost efficiency.  We therefore use stochastic geometry to investigate the effect of co-location on the benefits of resource sharing. 

Under national roaming, subscribers of a certain mobile network operator can receive an internet connection from any other operator, which provides benefits in terms of throughput and resilience for a user. We investigate what the benefits for national roaming are in the Netherlands, using available subscriber and BS data.

Science slam

In a 5G mmWave network with beamforming, how should we connect users to base stations? And, more importantly, can we find a near-optimal user association for each base station separately, without knowing the entire network state? We devise a heuristic, "beam-align", that connects users based on the misalignment with the BS beam. Beam-align performs close-to optimal, and is robust under network failures such as rain and blockage.

Presentation Pitch

We provide degree distributions for AB random geometric graphs, in which points of type A connect to the closest k points of type B. The motivating example to derive such degree distributions is in 5G wireless networks with multi-connectivity, where users connect to their closest k base stations.

We introduce a new method to locate highly connected clusters in a network. Our proposed approach adapts the HyperBall algorithm to localize regions with a high density of small subgraph patterns in large graphs in a memory-efficient manner.

Presentation

We investigate whether the promises of multi-connectivity (higher throughput and reliability) also hold in such a setting where all users of a network are connected through multiple links in the downlink.  Our analysis shows that while the reliability increases, the per- user throughput always decreases for higher degrees of multi-connectivity.

Presentation  Pitch