1,729 research outputs found
5G Millimeter Wave Cellular System Capacity with Fully Digital Beamforming
Due to heavy reliance of millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless systems on
directional links, Beamforming (BF) with high-dimensional arrays is essential
for cellular systems in these frequencies. How to perform the array processing
in a power efficient manner is a fundamental challenge. Analog and hybrid BF
require fewer analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), but can only communicate in
a small number of directions at a time,limiting directional search, spatial
multiplexing and control signaling. Digital BF enables flexible spatial
processing, but must be operated at a low quantization resolution to stay
within reasonable power levels. This paper presents a simple additive white
Gaussian noise (AWGN) model to assess the effect of low resolution quantization
of cellular system capacity. Simulations with this model reveal that at
moderate resolutions (3-4 bits per ADC), there is negligible loss in downlink
cellular capacity from quantization. In essence, the low-resolution ADCs limit
the high SNR, where cellular systems typically do not operate. The findings
suggest that low-resolution fully digital BF architectures can be power
efficient, offer greatly enhanced control plane functionality and comparable
data plane performance to analog BF.Comment: To appear in the Proceedings of the 51st Asilomar Conference on
Signals, Systems, and Computers, 201
Frame Structure Design and Analysis for Millimeter Wave Cellular Systems
The millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies have attracted considerable
attention for fifth generation (5G) cellular communication as they offer orders
of magnitude greater bandwidth than current cellular systems. However, the
medium access control (MAC) layer may need to be significantly redesigned to
support the highly directional transmissions, ultra-low latencies and high peak
rates expected in mmWave communication. To address these challenges, we present
a novel mmWave MAC layer frame structure with a number of enhancements
including flexible, highly granular transmission times, dynamic control signal
locations, extended messaging and ability to efficiently multiplex directional
control signals. Analytic formulae are derived for the utilization and control
overhead as a function of control periodicity, number of users, traffic
statistics, signal-to-noise ratio and antenna gains. Importantly, the analysis
can incorporate various front-end MIMO capability assumptions -- a critical
feature of mmWave. Under realistic system and traffic assumptions, the analysis
reveals that the proposed flexible frame structure design offers significant
benefits over designs with fixed frame structures similar to current 4G
long-term evolution (LTE). It is also shown that fully digital beamforming
architectures offer significantly lower overhead compared to analog and hybrid
beamforming under equivalent power budgets.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions for Wireless Communication
Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective
The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of
multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome
the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna
elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high
directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited
operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional
ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available
degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly
directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access
control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as
synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference
management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view
on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and
tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on
Communication
An Efficient Uplink Multi-Connectivity Scheme for 5G mmWave Control Plane Applications
The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies offer the potential of orders of
magnitude increases in capacity for next-generation cellular systems. However,
links in mmWave networks are susceptible to blockage and may suffer from rapid
variations in quality. Connectivity to multiple cells - at mmWave and/or
traditional frequencies - is considered essential for robust communication. One
of the challenges in supporting multi-connectivity in mmWaves is the
requirement for the network to track the direction of each link in addition to
its power and timing. To address this challenge, we implement a novel uplink
measurement system that, with the joint help of a local coordinator operating
in the legacy band, guarantees continuous monitoring of the channel propagation
conditions and allows for the design of efficient control plane applications,
including handover, beam tracking and initial access. We show that an
uplink-based multi-connectivity approach enables less consuming, better
performing, faster and more stable cell selection and scheduling decisions with
respect to a traditional downlink-based standalone scheme. Moreover, we argue
that the presented framework guarantees (i) efficient tracking of the user in
the presence of the channel dynamics expected at mmWaves, and (ii) fast
reaction to situations in which the primary propagation path is blocked or not
available.Comment: Submitted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless
Communications (TWC
Millimeter-wave Evolution for 5G Cellular Networks
Triggered by the explosion of mobile traffic, 5G (5th Generation) cellular
network requires evolution to increase the system rate 1000 times higher than
the current systems in 10 years. Motivated by this common problem, there are
several studies to integrate mm-wave access into current cellular networks as
multi-band heterogeneous networks to exploit the ultra-wideband aspect of the
mm-wave band. The authors of this paper have proposed comprehensive
architecture of cellular networks with mm-wave access, where mm-wave small cell
basestations and a conventional macro basestation are connected to
Centralized-RAN (C-RAN) to effectively operate the system by enabling power
efficient seamless handover as well as centralized resource control including
dynamic cell structuring to match the limited coverage of mm-wave access with
high traffic user locations via user-plane/control-plane splitting. In this
paper, to prove the effectiveness of the proposed 5G cellular networks with
mm-wave access, system level simulation is conducted by introducing an expected
future traffic model, a measurement based mm-wave propagation model, and a
centralized cell association algorithm by exploiting the C-RAN architecture.
The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed network to realize
1000 times higher system rate than the current network in 10 years which is not
achieved by the small cells using commonly considered 3.5 GHz band.
Furthermore, the paper also gives latest status of mm-wave devices and
regulations to show the feasibility of using mm-wave in the 5G systems.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, accepted to be published in IEICE Transactions
on Communications. (Mar. 2015
Initial Access in 5G mm-Wave Cellular Networks
The massive amounts of bandwidth available at millimeter-wave frequencies
(roughly above 10 GHz) have the potential to greatly increase the capacity of
fifth generation cellular wireless systems. However, to overcome the high
isotropic pathloss experienced at these frequencies, high directionality will
be required at both the base station and the mobile user equipment to establish
sufficient link budget in wide area networks. This reliance on directionality
has important implications for control layer procedures. Initial access in
particular can be significantly delayed due to the need for the base station
and the user to find the proper alignment for directional transmission and
reception. This paper provides a survey of several recently proposed techniques
for this purpose. A coverage and delay analysis is performed to compare various
techniques including exhaustive and iterative search, and Context Information
based algorithms. We show that the best strategy depends on the target SNR
regime, and provide guidelines to characterize the optimal choice as a function
of the system parameters.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, 3 tables, 15 references, submitted to IEEE COMMAG
201
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