Abstract
Small cells are becoming a promising solution for providing enhanced coverage and increasing system capacity in a large-scale small cell network. In such a network, the large number of small cells may cause mobility signalling overload on the core network (CN) due to frequent handovers, which impact the users Quality of Experience (QoE). This is one of the major challenges in dense small cell networks. Such a challenge has been considered, this thesis addresses this challenging task to design an effective signalling architecture in dense small cell networks. First, in order to reduce the signalling overhead incurred by path switching operations in the small cell network, a new mobility control function, termed the Small Cell Controller (SCC) is introduced to the existing base station (BS) on the Radio-Access-Network(RAN)-side. Based on the signalling architecture, a clustering optimisation algorithm is proposed in order to select the optimal SCC in a highly user density environment. Specifically, this algorithm is designed to select multiple optimal SCCs due to the growth in number of small cells in the large-scale environment. Finally, a scalable architecture for handling the control plane failures in heterogeneous networks is proposed. In that architecture, the proposed SCC scheme controls and manages the affected small cells in a clustered fashion during the macro cell fail-over period. Particularly, the proposed SCC scheme can be flexibly configured into a hybrid scenario. For operational reduction (reducing a number of direct S1 connections to the CN), better scalability (reducing a number of S1 bearers on the CN) and reduction of signalling load on the CN, the proposed radio access network (RAN) signalling architecture is a viable and preferable option for dense small cell networks. Besides, the proposed signalling architecture is evaluated through realistic simulation studies.