EDEN is an International Research Experience for students (IRES) project. This project provides opportunity to US university students (US national or permanent residents) for an 8-week fully paid summer placement at the internationally recognized 5th Generation Cellular Systems Innovation Centre (5GIC) at the University of Surrey, U.K. 5GIC is the largest and one of the most reputed wireless research group in Europe. This IRES project will provide up to fifteen US students (graduate and under graduate) an opportunity to work on world’s first and only outdoor 5G test-bed for wireless cellular system innovation that has recently been established at the University of Surrey as part of 5GIC, with over $100 million public and industrial funding. For each of the three years of EDEN project, a cohort of 4-5 students will be recruited for this program. The program will last for 12 weeks (4 weeks at the University of Oklahoma, Tulsa, and 8 weeks at 5GIC, UK) starting around May each year. Flights, accommodation costs and bench fee at the 5GIC during UK visit will be covered by the EDEN project. Additionally, each student will be paid bursary of about $500/week for the 12-week duration of the program. At the beginning of the program, the participating students will attend an intensive four-week research preparation training at the University of Oklahoma. In this pre-departure preparation phase students will be guided to select a project of their choice to work on during the program. Student projects will fall within the broader domain of 5G networks. Some indicative project topics include: Interference Mitigation, Energy Efficiency and Mobility Management in ultra-dense wireless networks. Team projects consisting of up to 2 students per team are allowed. This preparation phase will be followed by eight week's research placement at the 5GIC, UK. A publishable quality outcome is expected out of each student project by the end of program. During these visits, in addition to closely interacting with over 20 industrial partners, 15 fulltime faculty, 40 post-doctoral fellows, and over 100 PhD students at 5GIC, US students will be closely mentored by two globally recognized researchers Dr. Muhammad Imran, and Prof. Rahim Tafazolli at the 5GIC. During this visit, students will also attend weekly research meetings conducted at 5GIC in which large number of 5GIC researchers regularly participate and present their work. Students will also be taken for site visits to the campuses of the industrial partners of 5GIC that include: Vodafone, Samsung, Huawei, and British Telecom among others. EDEN Project PI, Dr. Imran already has ongoing collaboration in place with researchers at 5GIC, and will accompany students for first week of their visit to help them get oriented.

Cell densification is emerging as one of the key means to gain 1000x target capacity gain in the fifth generation (5G) cellular systems. This emerging reality poses a major challenge for the cellular industry: How to manage the susceptibility of an ultra-dense, extremely complex 5G network to a potentially high cell outage rate?
Definition: A complete (or partial) cell outage is a scenario when either Base Station (BS) hardware and/or software malfunctions or when one or more cell parameters become misconfigured during network operations. Partial outage refers to scenarios when the cell continues to operate but its performance degrades below its typical level. In this proposal, the term cell outage refers to both partial and complete cell outages. The rate of outages is intrinsically proportional to cell density, and complexity of hardware and software that constitute the radio access network. Both of these factors have been consistently on rise from 1G to 4G, and trend is expected to continue for 5G. Currently, cellular carriers in the US alone currently spend over $15 billion annually to manage cell outages. In current cellular networks, drive tests or hardware fault alarms are employed for detecting cell outage; transitory cell outage compensation in the affected area is accomplished with makeshift cell-on-wheel. Such semi-manual approaches to cell outage management have proven inadequate and highly inefficient even for today’s operators, making them unfeasible for sustaining future cellular networks marked by ultra-dense cell deployment and mounting operational complexity. If no intervening measures are taken, cell outage management will be a primary challenge for future cellular networks, such as 5G.
The ASSH project aims to address this challenge by developing an Advance Cell Outage Management (ACOM) framework for automating cell outage detection and compensation in future ultra-dense, heterogeneous cellular networks, thereby equipping them with fully self-healing functionality. ACOM integrates three novel schemes: 1) Autonomous highly agile, Macro Cell Outage Detection (MOD); 2) Autonomous Small Cell Outage Detection (SOD); and 3) Autonomous Heterogeneous Cell Outage Compensation (HOC). ACOM will provide solution for not only complete outages, which are easy to detect, but partial outages i.e. sleeping cells. Sleeping cells refer to scenarios where cells remain ON, but certain of its KPIs fall below the typical level.
A large number of technical challenges are anticipated in development of ACOM. These challenges will be addressed by leveraging analytical tools from machine learning, big data analytics, optimization, chaos theory and game theory paradigms, by building on our past experience in this domain gained e.g. under QSON project. If this work sounds interesting, contact PI Ali Imran for collaboration opportunities.

How to manage user mobility resource efficiently and seamlessly in future dense networks consisting of cells of varying sizes on a wide range of frequency bands with entirely different propagation characteristics?

1. Mobility management in the current networks requires continuous signaling to support handover (HO) preparation, execution, completion phases. In UDMN (ultra dense mobile networks), with dramatically increased HOs, signaling overheads with current mobility management mechanisms will become unacceptably high.
2. Current networks already require extensive ongoing field trial based or semi-manual optimization of a myriad of mobility management parameters for each cell, such as: neighbor relationship tables, Cell Individual Offsets (CIO), hysteresis, Time to Trigger (TTT), thresholds for handover related events such as A1, A2, A3, A4 and A5, B1 and B2. With current approach, in UDMN this process may become too complex to be viable.
3. In LTE HO failure rate is targeted for below 5%. However, recent 3GPP study shows that adding only ten small cells per macro cell can push the HO failure rate to as high as 60%, indicating the breakdown of current mobility management mechanism in UDMN.
4. In UDMN given the much smaller average cell size and thus small user sojourn time, the time to complete a HO must be reduced significantly from the current LTE target of 65ms. New agile HO design is also needed to meet the ambitious low latency requirements in 5G.
5. To perform a HO in UDMN, mobile devices must discover small cells operating on very different frequency bands by periodically running an Inter Frequency Small Cell Discovery (ISCD) process. UDMN will require ISCD rate much higher than the current rate for LTE. This will exacerbate mobile battery life problem in UDMN.
6. Conventional cellular bands exhibit graceful signal decay and thus allow use of hysteresis for HO preparation phase and to avoid ping pong. However, mmWave cells in UDMN will have sharp (line of sight) and sudden (when link becomes non-line of sight) signal strength drops, requiring re-thinking of the way HOs are performed in current networks.
7. Unlike conventional band cells that have omni-directional or wide-beam sector antennas and thus can easily be discovered by an oncoming mobile user to start the HO process, mmWave cells will rely on narrow beams to overcome the high propagation losses. This means unless a mmWave cell has aligned its beam with an oncoming mobile user, it cannot discover the user, or be discovered by the user to start the HO process. This gives rise to a new type of cell/user discovery problem unseen in legacy networks making mobility management further challenging in UDMN.
8. Finally, these idiosyncrasies of UDMN render ineffective the currently proposed legacy network based designs of the two key and recently standardized mobility management Self-Organizing Network (SON) functions namely: Mobility Robust Optimization (MRO) and Mobility Load Balancing (MLB).

The goal of this project is to develop TurboRAN: Testbed for Ultra-Dense-Multi-Band Control and Data Plane Split Radio Access Networks of the Future. TurboRAN will cover an area of 360,000 square meters at The University of Oklahoma (OU) campus as well as an indoor lab area of 7,500 square feet. This novel testbed will have the ability to experimentally test the static and dynamic parameters associated with a multi-cell, multi-tier, multi-band cellular eco-system being envisioned for 5G and beyond. To capture the envisioned deployment scenarios for 5G and beyond and enable compelling new research on AI enabled proactive self-organizing networks (P-SON), control and data plane split architecture (CDSA) and database aided CDSA, TurboRAN will comprise of three layers of cells 1. Operation in HF bands as well as in mm-Wave bands 2. Conventional heterogeneous as well as C-RAN implementation 3. MIMO provision mobile access points and UEs. In addition to end-to-end programmability and flexibility for modelling a variety of futuristic heterogeneous cellular system scenarios, another unique feature of the TurboRAN will be the integrated big data processing capability to explore the potential of untapped cellular control and user plane data for designing artificial intelligence enabled proactive rather than reactive next generation SON (i.e. P-SON). Together, these features make the planned testbed a powerful enabler for cutting-edge research towards future cellular networks.