BiSON: A Bioinspired Self-Organizing Network for Dynamic Auto-Configuration in 5G Wireless

Emerging 5G wireless networks are expected to herald significant transformation in industrial applications, with improved coverage, high data rates, and massive device capacity. However, the introduction of 5G wireless makes the network configuration, management, and planning extremely challenging. For efficient network configuration, every cell needs to be allocated a particular Physical Cell Identifier (PCID), which is unique in its vicinity. Wireless standards (e.g., 3GPP) typically specify a limited number of PCIDs. However, the number of cells in 5G Ultradense Networks (UDN) is expected to significantly outnumber these limited PCIDs. Hence, these PCIDs need to be efficiently allocated among the myriad of cells, such that two cells which are neighbors or neighbor’s neighbor are assigned with different PCIDs. This complicated network configuration problem becomes even more complex by dynamic introduction and removal of 5G small cells (e.g., micro, femto, and pico). In this paper, we introduce BiSON, a new Bioinspired Self-Organizing Solution for automated and efficient PCID configuration in 5G UDN. Using two different extensions, namely, “always near-optimal” and “heuristic,” we explain near-optimal and dynamic auto-configuration in computationally feasible time, with negligible overhead. Our extensive network simulation experiments, based on actual 5G wireless trials, demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves better optimality (minimum PCIDs in use) than earlier works in a reasonable computational complexity.