Dynamic Demand Control with Differentiated QoS in User-in-the-Loop Controlled Cellular Networks

Cellular communications now and beyond 2020 faces a number of challenges. One of the trends is the ever increasing demand for data rate due to smart mobile devices with an estimated traffic growth of almost 100% per annum. Even with new cellular generation cycles every few years the same increase rate cannot be provided on the supply side. Neither anywhere nor anytime. The gap between supply and demand of wireless capacity will shorten and the conventional over-provisioning approach will not be possible anymore, especially during busy hours. The consequences are more frequent congestion situations with broken application traffic. The quality-of-experience will suffer as user expectations are high and steamed-up by advertising. An inadequate tariff system concentrating on flat-rates is also counterproductive for stability and energy-efficiency. In this paper the temporal user-in-the-loop (UIL) control approach is assumed. This user-centric model implements demand shaping by incentives in form of a dynamic usage-based tariff which adjusts based on the level of congestion in the busy hours. This is comparable to the smart grid operation principle. The novelty in this paper is the differentiated treatment for the exemplary service classes voice, video and data, for which new quantitative user response data is utilized. The control approach performance is calculated and results for stationary and dynamic scenarios are presented.