Location-Aware Smart Network Management in Advanced Networks: Design and Applied Proof of Concept

Smart network management is one of the key innovation areas for current and future generations of cellular networks. This field is especially meaningful for the use cases introduced in the Fifth Generation (5G) technology, with their varied scenarios and requirements, leading to a far more challenging management. Cellular networks have traditionally shown underperformance in specific conditions and scenarios, e.g., crowded places, high-speed scenarios, indoor environments, or coverage holes. All the previous have one common point: they are related to the users’ location. In this sense, users’ localization has been proven to be a key enabler in supporting smart analysis and decision-making over networks. The present work proposes a complete location-based network management infrastructure, which is evaluated in a real network scenario. The proposed infrastructure presents a novel approach for the interconnection of several virtualized components and functionalities leveraging location information. The interconnected components are validated jointly using data from a real network.