This article investigates the mobility management of an ultra dense cellular network (UDN) from an energy-efficiency (EE) point of view. Many dormant base stations (BSs) in a UDN do not transmit signals, and thus a received power based handover (HO) approach as in traditional cellular networks is hardly applicable. In addition, the limited front/backhaul capacity compared to a huge number of BSs makes it difficult to implement a centralized HO and power control. For these reasons, a novel user-centric association rule is proposed, which jointly optimizes HO and power control for maximizing EE. The proposed mobility management is able to cope not only with the spatial randomness of user movement but also with temporally correlated wireless channels. The proposed approach is implemented over a HO time window and tractable power control policy by exploiting mean-field game (MFG) and stochastic geometry (SG). Compared to a baseline with a fixed HO interval and transmit power, the proposed approach achieves the 1.2 times higher long-term average EE at a typical active BS.

This paper proposes a dual-connectivity (DC) profile allocation algorithm, in which a central macro base station (MBS) is underlaid with randomly scattered small base stations (SBSs), operating on different carrier frequencies. We introduce two dual-connectivity profiles and the differences among them. We utilize the characteristics of dual-connectivity profiles and their applying scenarios to reduce feasible combination set to consider. Algorithm analysis and numerical results verify that our proposed algorithm achieve the optimal algorithm's performance within 5% gap with quite low complexity up to 10 −6 times.

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One of the challenges facing the next-generation wireless networks is to cope with the expected demand for data. This calls for an efficient spectrum regulation that can enable mobile subscribers to support high quality of service (QoS) and mobile network operators (MNOs) to leverage their profit streams. In this paper, we present a new spectrum allocation policy in a monopoly situation. The problem is formulated as a Stackelberg game. We show that the conventional spectrum leasing contract may lead to the unprecedented scenario in which costs outweigh their revenues. On the other hand, our proposed spectrum leasing contract can not only maximize user welfare but also leverage MNO's profit streams. We show that our spectrum leasing contract can increase user welfare and MNO's profit up to 75% and 20%, respectively, relative to the conventional spectrum leasing contract. Thus, regulators must rewrite their spectrum allocation policy in order to maximize user welfare and leverage MNO's profit streams.