Framework to Support Mobility Context Awareness in Cellular Networks

Mobile communication is arguably the most ubiquitously used technology in contemporary world, evolving towards its fifth generation (5G). The key challenges being faced by present day mobile communication are growing number of mobile users and subsequent high traffic volume posed by them. Providing uniform service quality and best quality of experience (QoE) in such dense scenarios is a major motive of 5G. Context awareness is a concept of extracting information from the user and his environment, and utilizing it to optimize user performance. Context awareness is recognized as one of the key pillars in enabling uniform quality of experience for mobile users. For instance, predicting the next cell for user transition, predicting the crowd formation in a cell etc., will assist the basestation to reserve or manage resources and prepare the cell well in advance for a future event, targeting to provide uninterrupted and uniform QoE. This paper investigates context aware procedures with a focus on user mobility, finds commonalities among different procedures and proposes a general framework to support mobility context awareness. The new information and interfaces which are required from various entities (e.g., vehicular infrastructure) are discussed. Further, a context aware resource allocation algorithm is designed, exploiting new interfaces and information arising from vehicular infrastructure. Simulation results demonstrate improvements in user throughput, thus validating the requirement of new interfaces.