
P. MuñozUniversity of Granada | UGR
P. Muñoz
Telecommunication Engineer
About
63
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Introduction
My reseach interests include radio access network planning and management, artificial intelligence for radio resource management, network slicing, spectrum sharing and virtualization of wireless networks. I am Guest Editor of the Special Issue “Radio Access Network Planning and Management” in journal Electronics.
Feel free to visit my personal page at: https://www.ugr.es/~pabloml
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2009 - present
Publications
Publications (63)
Modeling the probability of blocking User Equipment (UE) sessions within a cell is a crucial aspect within the management of 5G services with Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) requirements, especially in the process of planning in advance the deployment of such services. The complexity of modeling the UE blocking probability arises from the dependency of t...
Modeling the probability of blocking User Equipment (UE) sessions is key for planning in advance the amount of radio resources required by a Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) slice. This task is challenging since the amount of these resources depends on factors such as the channel quality of each UE, the packet scheduler discipline, and the GBR requirement...
The Radio Access Network (RAN) slice planning is a key phase within the RAN slice management and orchestration process. Based on the performance requirements of requested RAN slices and key performance indicators of the RAN and existing RAN slices, the RAN slice planning mainly consists of deciding (a) the feasibility of deploying new RAN slices; (...
Fifth Generation (5G) is expected to meet stringent performance network requisites of the Industry 4.0. Moreover, its built-in network slicing capabilities allow for the support of the traffic heterogeneity in Industry 4.0 over the same physical network infrastructure. However, 5G network slicing capabilities might not be enough in terms of degree...
Fifth Generation (5G) is here to accelerate the digitization of economies and society, and open up innovation opportunities for verticals. A myriad of 5G-enabled use cases has been identified across disparate sectors like tourism, retail industry, and manufacturing. Many of the networks of these use cases are expected to be private networks, that i...
This Special Issue aims at collecting contributions concerning 5G and beyond RAN planning and management. Potential authors are invited to submit manuscripts on topics including but are not limited to the following:
ML and big data for RAN management;
Self-organizing networks evolution;
AI/ML-driven coverage, capacity, frequency planning;
Data-dri...
This white paper on AI and ML as enablers of beyond 5G (B5G) networks is based on contributions from 5G PPP projects that research, implement and validate 5G and B5G network systems.
The white paper introduces the main relevant mechanisms in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), currently investigated and exploited for 5G and B5G...
Multi-tenancy allows diverse agents sharing the infrastructure in the 5 th generation of mobile networks. Such a feature calls for more automated and faster planning procedures in order to adapt the network capacity to the varying traffic demand. To achieve these goals, Small Cells offer network providers more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective...
An important concept in the fifth generation of mobile networks is multitenancy, which allows diverse operators sharing the same wireless infrastructure. To support this feature in conjunction with the challenging performance requirements of future networks, more automated and faster planning of the required radio capacity is needed. Likewise, inst...
The number of connected IoT devices is significantly increasing and it is expected to reach more than two dozens of billions of IoT connections in the coming years. Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) have become very relevant for this new paradigm due to features such as large coverage and low power consumption. One of the most appealing technolo...
When a network operator designs strategies for planning and operating Guaranteed Bit Rate (GBR) slices, there are inherent issues such as the under(over)-provisioning of radio resources. To avoid them, modeling the User Equipment (UE) blocking probability in each cell is key. This task is challenging due to the total required bandwidth depends on t...
Anomaly detection in the performance of the huge number of elements that are part of cellular networks (base stations, core entities, and user equipment) is one of the most time consuming and key activities for supporting failure management procedures and ensuring the required performance of the telecommunication services. This activity originally...
The massive deployment of Small Cells (SCs) is increasingly being adopted by mobile operators to face the exponentially growing traffic demand. Using the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band in the access and backhaul networks will be key to provide the capacity that meets such demand. However, dimensioning and planning have become complex tasks, because...
The new fifth generation (5G) era has transformed previous mobile generations into fast, smart networks that will be more responsive and customizable. With network slicing, 5G networks can be dynamically adapted to the different needs of specific vertical industries. This capability has opened the opportunity to new business models whereby infrastr...
To implement the next Generation NodeBs (gNBs) that are present in every Radio Access Network (RAN) slice subnet, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) enables the deployment of some of the gNB components as Virtual Networks Functions (VNFs). Deploying individual VNF instances for these components could guarantee the customization of each RAN slice...
The standardization of Radio Access Network (RAN) in mobile networks has traditionally been led by 3GPP. However, the emergence of RAN slicing has introduced new aspects that fall outside 3GPP scope. Among them, network virtualization enables the particularization of multiple RAN behaviors over a common physical infrastructure. Using Virtualized Ne...
Network slicing is considered a key mechanism to serve the multitude of tenants (e.g. vertical industries) targeted by forthcoming 5G systems in a flexible and cost-efficient manner. In this paper, we present a SDN/NFV architecture with multi-tenancy support. This architecture enables a network slice provider to deploy network slice instances for m...
An important concept in the 5th generation of mobile networks is multi-tenancy, which allows diverse operators sharing the same wireless infrastructure. To support this feature in conjunction with the challenging performance requirements of future networks, more automated and faster planning of the required radio capacity is needed. Likewise, insta...
Within Self-Organizing Networks (SON), the Cell Outage Compensation (COC) functionality is one of the most important use cases in Self-Healing in mobile communication networks. The state-of-theart has proposed different COC techniques, each of them to be indistinctly applied to all cells in outage. Conversely, this paper presents an important impro...
Self-healing is one of the main functionalities of Self-Organizing-Networks. Among self-healing functions, diagnosis or root cause analysis, consisting of identifying the fault cause in problematic cells, is one of the most complex tasks. Expert systems, such as Fuzzy Logic Controllers or Bayesian Networks, have been previously proposed to implemen...
The latest advances in wireless technologies have led to a proliferation of data mobile devices and services. As a consequence, mobile networks have experienced a significant increase in data traffic, while voice traffic has shown nearly no growth. It is therefore essential for operators to understand the data traffic behavior at the user level in...
Self-organizing networks (SONs) are an important feature for network management automation in the new generation of mobile communications. While SONs have been considered to be part of the recent 3GPP standards such as LTE, it is expected that future 5G mobile networks will present new challenges for SON solutions. One of the most important use cas...
In the context of Self-Organizing Networks (SON), this paper presents a novel cell degradation compensation algorithm based on handover margin modifications. The fault considered in this paper is a weak coverage use case so that the faulty cell will be active during the compensation, but its power will be abnormally lower than it should. Unlike the...
Traditionally, in cellular networks, troubleshooting experts have manually analyzed Key Performance Indicators (KPI), so that they could identify the cause of problems and fix them. With the emergence of Self-Organizing Networks, Self-Healing systems are designed to automate those troubleshooting tasks. With that aim, the behavior of the KPIs (i.e....
Within the functionality of self-healing in self-organizing networks, automatic root cause analysis is typically focused on identifying problems at the cell level, based on the statistics gathered by the operation, administration, and maintenance system. Therefore, mobile operators lose visibility of the problems that directly affect users¿¿¿ perfo...
The increasing amount of network elements in the current deployments of cellular networks is leading to an enormous complexity of the operation and maintenance. Selforganizing networks (SONs) is a good solution for operators to save operational expenditures by automating network management. One of the key challenges in this context is the automatic...
Mobile networks have rapidly evolved in recent years due to the increase in multimedia traffic and offered services. This has led to a growth in the volume of control data and measurements that are used by self-healing systems. To maintain a certain quality of service, self-healing systems must complete their tasks in a reasonable time. The conjunc...
By 2020, mobile networks will support a wide range of communication services while at the same time, the number of user terminals will be enormous. To cope with such increased complexity in network management, innovative solutions for the next generation of self-organizing networks (SONs) need to be deployed. In the field of self-healing, the heter...
The current trend in the management of mobile communication networks is to increase the level of automation in order to enhance network performance while reducing Operational Expenditure (OPEX). In this context, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has presented different solutions. On the one hand, Self-Organizing Networks (SON) include s...
Macrocell and small cell deployments and self-organizing network (SON) techniques work together to increase indoor cellular network capacity and ensure better quality of service (QoS). As a consequence of uneven local user densities and temporal or spatial fluctuations of traffic, the network may suffer overload situations, which partially degrades...
This letter presents a novel cell outage detection algorithm based on incoming handovers statistics. The main advantage of the proposed algorithm is that it uses neighbor measurements that allow to detect outage in two cases. First, when the cell in outage is able to report performance indicators; second, when these indicators are not available bec...
The recent developments in cellular networks, along with the increase in services, users and the demand of high quality have raised the Operational Expenditure (OPEX). Self-Organizing Networks (SON) are the solution to reduce these costs. Within SON, self-healing is the functionality that aims to automatically solve problems in the radio access net...
Abstract This paper presents a novel approach for self-healing in cellular networks based on the application of mobile terminals context information: time, service, activity, identity and, especially, location. Context information is therefore used to support root cause analysis, providing improved network fault diagnosis compared to classical non-...
In the last years, mobile networks have seen a great increase in complexity, as the data traffic, the demand for quality and the variety of offered services have grown. The management costs of modern networks are growing, at the same time as operators compete to offer shorter downtime and less impact of network issues on the user experience. Self-O...
The increase in size and complexity of current cellular networks is complicating their operation and maintenance tasks. While the end-to-end user experience in terms of throughput and latency has been significantly improved, cellular networks have also become more prone to failures. In this context, mobile operators start to concentrate their effor...
Self-healing networks aim to detect cells with service degradation, identify the fault cause of their problem, and execute compensation and repair actions. The development of this type of automatic system presents several challenges to be confronted. The first challenge is the scarce number of historically reported faults, which greatly complicates...
Resumen—The Self-Organizing Networks (SON) aim to raise the level of automated operation in mobile networks. The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is the next-generation of wireless technology, where the concept of SON has special relevance. One of the use cases defined in this field is the optimization of the handover (HO) process, which leads to a trade-...
Self-Organizing Networks (SONs) aim to raise the level of automated management in cellular technologies. In this field, Load Balancing (LB) and Handover Optimization (HOO) are two important functions to improve network performance. As these two functions can adjust the same parameters, a conflict may happen if LB and HOO tune them at the same time....
Mobile-broadband traffic has experienced a large increase over the past few years. Femtocells are envisioned to cope with such a demand of capacity in indoor environments. Since those small cells are low-cost nodes, a thorough deployment is not typically performed, particularly in enterprise scenarios. As a result, the matching between traffic dema...
Self-organizing networks (SONs) aim to raise the level of automated operation in next-generation networks. One of the use cases defined in this field is the optimization of the handover (HO) process, which involves a tradeoff between the amount of signaling load due to HOs and the quality of the active connections in the network. In this paper, fir...
Mobile broadband traffic has been increasing in the last years. To cope with such traffic demand, heterogeneous networks are an effective solution characterized by deploying networks with different cell sizes, radio access technologies (RATs) and carrier frequencies. Since the coverage area of these networks (or layers) is partially overlapped, use...
The large increase in size and complexity experienced by cellular networks in recent years has led to a new paradigm known as heterogeneous networks, or HetNets. In this context, networks with different cell sizes, radio access technologies, or carrier frequencies can be deployed in the same environment. As the coverage area of each of these networ...
Load balancing is considered by the 3GPP as an important issue in Self-Organizing Networks due to its effectiveness to increase network capacity. In next generation wireless networks, load balancing can be easily implemented by tuning handover (HO) margins, achieving a decrease in call blocking. However, call dropping can be increased as a negative...
In the context of Long-Term Evolution (LTE), the next generation mobile telecommunication network, femtocells are low-power base stations that efficiently provide coverage and capacity indoors. This paper presents a computationally efficient dynamic system-level LTE simulator for enterprise femtocell scenarios. The simulator includes specific mobil...
Computationally-Efficient Design of a Dynamic System-Level LTE Simulator
The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is the next generation of current mobile telecommunication networks. LTE has a new flat radio-network architecture and a significant increase in spectrum efficiency. In this paper, a computationally-efficient tool for dynamic system-level LTE simu...
In cellular networks, traffic demand is unevenly distributed both in time and space. This paper investigates the problem of re-distributing traffic demand between LTE femtocells in an enterprise scenario. A performance comparison of several traffic sharing techniques is carried out based on simulations. For this purpose, an efficient dynamic system...
In Self-Organizing Networks (SON), load balancing has been recognized as an effective means to increase network performance. In cellular networks, cell load balancing can be achieved by tuning handover parameters, for which a Fuzzy Logic Controller (FLC) usually provides good performance and usability. Operator experience can be used to define the...
In this paper the behavior and the self-optimization of an LTE network under realistic conditions are investigated. To enhance network performance in a urban environment a controller to auto-tune parameters has been proposed. An urban mobility model has also been defined in order to test the proposed method under realistic conditions. This model al...
The Long-Term Evolution (LTE) is the next generation of current mobile telecommunication networks. LTE has a new flat radio-network architecture and a significant increase in spectrum efficiency. In this paper a link level implementation in a system-level LTE simulator is proposed. There are two important functions at link level to increase the net...