Section: Application Domains

Application to mobile telecommunication networks

With the extraordinary success of mobile telecommunication systems, service providers have been affording huge investments for network design and infrastructure. Mobile network design is of outmost importance, and is thus a major issue in mobile telecommunication systems. In fact, with the continuous and rapid growth of communication traffic, large scale planning becomes more and more difficult. Hence, automatic, interactive and self-adaptive optimization algorithms and tools would be very useful and helpful. Advances in this area will certainly lead to important improvements in terms of quality of service, network management and cost deployment.

In the past, the DOLPHIN team has initiated solid industrial collaborations within the domain of mobile networks. In fact, the problem of network design and frequency assignment was studied in collaboration with France Telecom. In particular, a new formulation/resolution of the problem as a multi-objective constrained combinatorial optimization problem was considered. In collaboration with Mobinets, the DOLPHIN team has also addressed the problem of access network design. The problem consists in minimizing the cost of the access network and maximizing its availability.

More recently, the DOLPHIN team has been interested in new optimization models and algorithms to address new difficult problems raised by new emerging technologies in wireless networks. In fact, wireless communications are evolving from inflexible and monolithic systems to a composite radio environment made of cognitive radio devices and networks of different technologies. Within this context, the challenge is to design new optimization techniques which are not only resource, power, scale, and applications aware, but which are self-adaptive and fully distributed in order to allow the dynamic optimization of radio-devices behaviors depending on the environment constraints e.g., spectrum availability, network traffic, user demand, etc. To achieve this goal, distributed and nature-inspired algorithms, such as ant-colony and bees, will be investigated in order to dynamically and distributively optimize predefined criterion such as throughput, fairness, quality of service to cite a few. It is expected that the techniques developed in this work will lead to the design of new models and algorithms for opportunistic/dynamic spectrum access and cross layer network optimization which are at the core of future generation wireless networks.