With the constant growth of software-defined radio (SDR) technologies in fields related to wireless communications, the need for efficient ways of testing and evaluating the physical-layer (PHY) protocols developed for these technologies in real-life traffic scenarios has become more critical. This paper proposes a software testbed that enhances the creation of network environments that allow GNU radio applications to be fed with test traffic in a simple way and through an interoperable interface. This makes the use of any traffic generator possible—existing ones or one that is custom-built—to evaluate a GNU radio application. In addition, this paper proposes an efficient way to collect PHY-specific monitoring data to improve the performance of the critical components of the message delivery path by employing the protocol buffers library. This study considers the entire testing and evaluation ecosystem and demonstrates how PHY-specific monitoring information is collected, handled, stored, and processed as time series to allow complex visualization and real-time monitoring.

5G wireless networks have as one of the main characteristics the large-scale deployment of small cells (microcells, picocells, etc.), which is expected to bring several advantages in what concerns the high speed and low latency connectivity of the users. This large-scale deployment of small cells also raises several technical challenges, provisioning the backhaul connectivity being one of them. The paper considers the situations when small cells are deployed temporarily or are deployed in a vehicle transporting many passengers, situations when the traditional wired or wireless backhaul solutions could be too costly to be used. The paper proposes, as an alternative solution, the use as backhaul connections of the wireless links set up in the macro cells which cover the location of the small cell. The paper proposes several Game Theory (GT)-based Load-Balancing (LB) algorithms for distributing the traffic of the small cell users over the macro cell links. The proposed LB algorithms are evaluated by computer simulations and are compared with “classical” LB algorithms considered as references. The performed computer simulations show that the auction-based algorithms have the best performance in terms of delay suffered by the transmitted data packets, while the selfish routing type algorithm has weaker performance, even behaving poorly than some of the reference non-GT-based algorithms. The paper also considers the situation when several small cell APs are deployed in a limited area or a vehicle and the user groups that attach to different APs should be identified. The paper proposes two GT-based user clustering algorithms, and the performance of these algorithms are evaluated by computer simulations. These simulations show that even simple clustering algorithms could improve the distribution of the traffic over the neighbor small cell APs and reduce the delay experienced by the data packets in the transmission system.

Multi-access and heterogeneous wireless communications are considered to be one of the solutions for providing generalized mobility, high system efficiency and improved user experience, which are important characteristics of the Next Generation Networks. This paper proposes a Vertical Handover (VHO) decision algorithm for heterogeneous network architectures which integrate both cellular networks and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). The cellular-WLAN and WLAN-WLAN VHO decisions are taken based on parameters which characterize both the coverage and the traffic load of the WLANs. Computer simulations performed in complex scenarios show that the proposed algorithm ensures better performance compared to “classical” VHO decision algorithms.