November 22, 2011

Award-winning – Optimized Access to Heterogeneous Mobile Communication Systems

ITG awarded HHI Researchers for particularly outstanding publication

In future mobile communication systems will be increasingly marked by their heterogeneous structure comprising of a variety of different access networks for a range of services like internet services or conferencing and gaming services. A single overarching administration service for all networks could therefore save costs, conserve resources and make for much more efficient usage. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute have developed an optimization method for such access control. And for their scholarly paper on this subject Dr. Gerhard Wunder and Jörg Bühler have been awarded the ITG Award for publications of outstanding merit.

A single overarching administration service for all communication networks means that end users would no longer have to bother selecting the appropriate access network while network providers could use the service to lower investment and operating costs. Concepts for such a service have already been developed – the Heterogeneous Access Management (HAM) system is designed to match a user inquiry with the appropriate access network. Dr. Gerhard Wunder and Jörg Bühler have investigated which mechanisms are needed for the selection of the appropriate network and how these need to be engineered. Their paper presents a general modeling and optimization approach to access control, network selection and access authorization in heterogeneous mobile communication systems. Optimization is based on stochastic control methods which take account of statistical parameters for user data traffic and channel quality. Simulations in a heterogeneous UMTS/GSM environment are used to demonstrate the superior efficiency of such a method.

Dr. Gerhard Wunder has worked since 2003 at the Fraunhofer German-Sino Lab for Mobile Communications (MCI) where he is head of the "Wireless information systems and statistical signal processing" research group. Since 2007 he has also been an assistant professor (Privatdozent) at the Technical University of Berlin. Jörg Bühler joined MCI in 2006 where he is a research scientist on the German Research Foundation's (DFG) project on "Duality Relations in Multiple User Mobile Communication Systems". The two scientists received the prestigious ITG award for their paper on "Traffic-Aware Optimization of Heterogeneous Access Management", published in the IEEE Transactions on Communications in June 2010.

The ITG Award is given to scientists and engineers for publications of outstanding merit in the field of information technology. The awards ceremony will be held on 23 November at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.