Demands for higher data rates for mobile services are steadily increasing. At the same time modern mobile communication systems as 3rd Generation systems (3G) and 4th Generation systems (4G) provide enhanced technologies, which enable higher spectral efficiencies and allow for higher data rates and cell capacities. Users of today's handhelds become more difficult to satisfy. While old feature phones generated only data or voice traffic, current smartphones, tablets, and netbooks run various applications in parallel that can fundamentally differ from each other. Compared to feature phones, this application mix leads to a number of new characteristics. For example, highly dynamic load statistics result.
Conventional cellular networks become more and more overloaded by data traffic; cf. G. Maier, F. Schneider, A. Feldmann. “A First Look at Mobile Hand-held Device Traffic”, In Proc. Int. Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement (PAM '10), April 2010. This high load is mainly caused by smart handhelds such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops, which may generate substantially more traffic than previous handheld generations, lead to complex traffic requests that may not be efficiently served at the base station, and span more and more user sessions over multiple cells, decreasing the network efficiency per session.
Furthermore, smart handhelds provide more information about the user, when compared to previous handheld generations. Context-Aware Resource Allocation (CARA) can exploit such information about the user's device, its location, and the communication demands of its currently running applications. Details on CARA can, for example, be found in M. Proebster, M. Kaschub, and S. Valentin “Context-Aware Resource Allocation to Improve the Quality of Service of Heterogeneous Traffic”, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), June 2011, or in EP11305685.7. By being aware of the user's context a Base Station (BS) can substantially reduce the network load without sacrificing the user's Quality of Service (QoS), M. Proebster, M. Kaschub, T. Werthmann, and S. Valentin, “Context-Aware Resource Allocation for Cellular Wireless Networks”, EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (WCN), submitted for review October 2011.