First Survey Results of Quantified User Behavior in User-in-the-Loop Scenarios for Sustainable Wireless Networks

Traffic in mobile radio networks is expected to continue to increase by 100% per year. This imposes a big challenge for future generations (4G and 5G) of access technologies which were previously dimensioned for over-provisioning especially in the busy hours. Recent forecasts hint that this assumption and approach will not be tractable anymore. Instead the demand will exceed the supply more and more frequently causing congestion not only in short term but over longer periods of time. Any approach to engineer networks greener by better spectral efficiency only will fail to meet the global objective, if demand keeps on increasing faster than supply and efficiency. Instead, the User-in-the-loop approach allows to shape the demand where it originates either in space or time. This is achieved by incentives for users to change location or by dynamic tariffs to shift the use of congested resources out of the busy hours. This works as the smart grid of communications. While some work has already been done in this new field, the user behavior to the controlled demand shaping was based on assumptions. In this paper, the assumptions were confirmed by recent survey results which indicate that shaping user behavior works sufficiently well. Models of the user response are given and analysis and simulation results show the advantages and gains of this approach.