We declare that we produced this diploma thesis ourselves under the guidance of Professor Dr. A K M Fazlul Haque, Professor in the Department of E.T.E. We also declare that neither this dissertation nor any part of this dissertation has been submitted elsewhere for the award of any degree or diploma. First of all, we would like to express our sincere thanks and gratitude to Almighty Allah for the successful completion of this task.
We would like to dedicate this thesis to our parents, because without their strict guidance it would not be possible to get this far. EFFECTS OF COVID-19 ON WIRELESS COMMUNICATION: GLOBAL ASPECT” in this thesis the outbreak of COVID-19 has been discussed which has changed the entire scenario in the entire world including the communication systems. The problems caused by the pandemic have been discovered through a series of collected data and the possible solutions that can be devised are described in this thesis.
INTRODUCTION
- Overview
- Aims and Objective
- Motivation
- Expected Outcome
- Report Layout
This thesis is motivated by the fact of several papers, magazines and articles describing the problems and impact caused by COVID-19 and how the network sector is dealing with the new traffic. However, the solutions here are not in full use and they can still be optimized or replaced with better solutions.
Introduction
Background
Methodology
Data Analysis
Conclusion and Future Scope
BACKGROUND
Related works
Impacts on Different sectors
- Health Sector
- Education Sector
- Travel and Tourism
- Production and delivery
- Agriculture
The school is still closing in many countries and therefore the assessment process is being changed and all students do not have the internet facility which makes them part of the study stream. Since the social distancing and lockdown was imposed, people are unable to move from one place to another. The products all over the world that were exported or imported had a very bad time.
So the products that were exported were lost and the products that were imported could not be delivered because freight or air transportation was not available. The people involved in production and supply were unemployed and their economic condition was at stake. Now in the modern era, with a digital platform that has made online shopping possible all over the world.
Amazon, DHL, Ali-baba and many more product suppliers that deliver products all over the world were unable to ship anything. The farmers who planted their crops could not gather them properly because there was not enough manpower to work. He had to work on this himself and that resulted in the riper crops or the climate destroying some of them.
Also, they could not preserve it well because the collectors were not available and also every farmer except the government does not have a cold store for storage. And since government works have also been postponed due to lack of preservation, a large amount of food is wasted, which will result in short storage of food in the long run.
How communication is affected
The chart shows that games varied 4% of the increase normally, but COVID made it more than 100%, to be exact 114%. This means that gaming, to be specific, online gaming has become the most popular pastime in this short period of time. Using a VPN, which was declining by 5% each week, soared to 49% to ensure a secure connection while working on the Internet.
Video consumption was steady but increased to 36% as movies, series and other OTT platforms became popular for entertainment. Downloads, web browsing and voice calls are also on the rise, but only the enjoyment of social sites has decreased.
METHODOLOGY
- Finding the problems
- Problems faced on the current networks
- Capacity Limitation
- Limitation of Backhaul
- Cell Outages
- Interruption in Service
- Energy Wastage
- Limitation of Rural Connectivity
- Reaction of ISP
The service providers were unaware of this sudden shift in traffic from the city to the rural areas. So somehow the work from the remote locations created an unprecedented increase in the traffic demand and the RANs in those areas were put under much more pressure than usual in the rural areas or where the demand was low to access the to obtain network. This problem may not be seen in the countries where there is good network infrastructure that combines with broadband and mobile networks.
But less developed countries do not have that much backup and as a result of network congestion, high latency and relatively lower data speed this problem can be found and it can be a burden to run remote operations. This resulted in poor quality of service (QoS), high latency and congestion in the backhaul network. Outages of a cell refer to the fact that that cell is not in working condition, specifically it is mostly out of service.
As COVID-19 spread across the world, the telecom workers working at the base stations, at the field level or in the support role also had to work from home. Moreover, the frequent service disruption can cause serious harm and cause many important issues to the users. So how the traffic flowed in the city and the energy consumed by the base stations is now underutilized.
Since the connectivity here is limited and the broadband connection is not always available or available everywhere, the coverage area is very low and we know in our country it is a very poor connection or network coverage in the town parts. Also in the global aspect, the connection in a rural area is not as strong as the megacities.
DATA COLLECTION
The Data Collection
Local Data
- Usage increase and area
- Slowness of internet
- Services used
- Latency
- Delay in usage of social sites
- User survey
- Mobile Networks
- Bad session rate
- Quality of Service (QoS)
In addition, 77% of users said they used the Internet more than before, which shows that the use of the Internet and jobs done through the Internet has increased. The pie chart shows that 53% of users stated that the Internet was not as responsive as before. About 69% of users said that they faced using these sites, which shows that the increase in the number of users had an impact on the application as well.
Most of the users were in the city and the data shows that most people used broadband internet, about 88.5% of users to be specific, and the rest of the 11.5% used mobile data. Data also shows that 38.8% of users stated that they used phone calls more than often during this pandemic period. About 64% of users have experienced low voice quality or dropped calls, which is a highly unwanted interruption in service.
The survey shows that about 39% of users have increased the number of calls, which is definitely an added pressure. This refers to the fact that the service cannot fulfill the users' requests. In the data, 55.3% of users stated that they do not reach the expected speed of the package they are enrolled in.
The pie chart shows that about 23% of users said they often noticed poor service and 15%. Quality of service refers to the overall performance of the service used by the user. From the data collected, users indicated that 53% of users faced buffering at night.
And last but not least, 58% of users are still facing the same problem with services.
Global data
- Traffic Data
- Relative traffic growth over the continents
- Growth rate of services
- Content Delivery Network
- Bad Session Rate (Global)
This means that the problem has not yet been resolved and necessary steps should be taken to improve this condition. The graph under consideration in this case shows the increase in services in the European region, India and the US. People started posting more about more than 50%, video usage also increased by about 10-20%, only photos were uploaded and seen less at the moment.
The blue line shows globally the countries with the most shutdown and it shows that Mobile has 1.25x CDN traffic than normal Broadband has 1.4x CDN traffic than normal. So this graph says that not all the countries had a problem with BSR, but a few South American countries, India these countries suffered in this case. The traffic growth was induced and that is why the bad session rate increased as we can see.
This proves the fact that the traffic growth after the imposed lockdown has caused the traffic increase and thus resulted in poor session rate. Round trip refers to the time it takes to transmit the signal and acknowledge that the signal has been received. Even in overpopulated countries that have a problem with this, it is otherwise greater than before, but it is becoming more or less constant.
Possible Solution
- Continuous Monitoring and self-optimization
- Backhaul optimization
- Cell Outage Detection
- Prediction of mobility
- Efficient network
- Strengthen the rural connection
- Enabling 5G
- Ensuring better Quality of Service
We now have a very high demand for higher data speeds and this will cause drastic inflation in connected devices. If we take the necessary steps to enable predictive transmission, we can easily predict when there will be high mobility and service will be much faster than we think. In the increased traffic, 5G has special features that make the network work better and has the ability to combine with AI [6].
If the quality of the service is improved, the resulting problems can be reduced in a very efficient way. The data will then be stored in a database in which all the fields submitted by the user will be displayed. An automated message will be sent to the user's completed email address when they submit the form.
There is another end which is the client end which will show the detailed problem and will have an action bar which will have two buttons for processing and solution. When the details button is clicked, the entire form submitted by the user will be displayed. All the fields filled by the user will be seen like this when the details button is clicked and the ISP can take necessary steps as per the issue.
When the complaint is submitted, when the technical team solves the problem, which will be sent after clicking the process button and finally, when the problem is solved, the ISP's end will click on solved, after which another automatic email will be sent. There is also the server end which will be serviced and the website is hosted with a free host so any problem may occur which will be considered as technical fault.
CONCLUSION
