Improving relay based cellular networks performance in highly user congested and emergency situations

PhDRelay based cellular networks (RBCNs) are the technologies that incorporate multi-hop communication into traditional cellular networks. A RBCN can potentially support higher data rates, more stable radio coverage and more dynamic services. In reality, RBCNs still suffer from performance degradation in terms of high user congestion, base station failure and overloading in emergency situations. The focus of this thesis is to explore the potential to improve IEEE802.16j supported RBCN performance in user congestion and emergency situations using adjustments to the RF layer (by antenna adjustments or extensions using multi-hop) and cooperative adjustment algorithms, e.g. based on controlling frequency allocation centrally and using distributed approaches. The first part of this thesis designs and validates network reconfiguration algorithms for RBCN, including a cooperative antenna power control algorithm and a heuristic antenna tilting algorithm. The second part of this thesis investigates centralized and distributed dynamic frequency allocation for higher RBCN frequency efficiency, network resilience, and computation simplicity. It is demonstrated that these benefits mitigate user congestion and base station failure problems significantly. Additionally, interweaving coordinated dynamic frequency allocation and antenna tilting is investigated in order to obtain the benefits of both actions. The third part of this thesis incorporates Delay Tolerate Networking (DTN) technology into RBCN to let users self-organize to connect to functional base station through multi-hops supported by other users. Through the use of DTN, RBCN coverage and performance are improved. This thesis explores the augmentation of DTN routing protocols to let more un-covered users connect to base stations and improve network load balancin

Partially-Distributed Resource Allocation in Small-Cell Networks

We propose a four-stage hierarchical resource allocation scheme for the downlink of a large-scale small-cell network in the context of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Since interference limits the capabilities of such networks, resource allocation and interference management are crucial. However, obtaining the globally optimum resource allocation is exponentially complex and mathematically intractable. Here, we develop a partially decentralized algorithm to obtain an effective solution. The three major advantages of our work are: 1) as opposed to a fixed resource allocation, we consider load demand at each access point (AP) when allocating spectrum; 2) to prevent overloaded APs, our scheme is dynamic in the sense that as the users move from one AP to the other, so do the allocated resources, if necessary, and such considerations generally result in huge computational complexity, which brings us to the third advantage: 3) we tackle complexity by introducing a hierarchical scheme comprising four phases: user association, load estimation, interference management via graph coloring, and scheduling. We provide mathematical analysis for the first three steps modeling the user and AP locations as Poisson point processes. Finally, we provide results of numerical simulations to illustrate the efficacy of our scheme.Comment: Accepted on May 15, 2014 for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Control and data channel resource allocation in OFDMA heterogeneous networks

This paper investigates the downlink resource allocation problem in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) consisting of macro cells and small cells sharing the same frequency band. Dense deployment of small cells overlaid by a macro layer is considered to be one of the most promising solutions for providing hotspot coverage in future 5G networks. The focus is to devise an optimised policy for small cells’ access to the shared spectrum, in terms of their transmissions, in order to keep small cell served users sum data rate at high levels while ensuring that certain level of quality of service (QoS) for the macro cell users in the vicinity of small cells is provided. Both data and control channel constraints are considered, to ensure that not only the macro cell users’ data rate demands are met, but also a certain level of Bit Error Rate (BER) is ensured for the control channel information. Control channel reliability is especially important as it holds key information to successfully decode the data channel. The problem is addressed by our proposed linear binary integer programming heuristic algorithm which maximises the small cells utility while ensuring the macro users imposed constraints. To further reduce the computational complexity, we propose a progressive interference aware low complexity heuristic solution. Discussion is also presented for the implementation possibility of our proposed algorithms in a practical network. The performance of both the proposed algorithms is compared with the conventional Reuse-1 scheme under different fading conditions and small cell loads. Results show a negligible drop in small cell performance for our proposed schemes, as a trade-off for ensuring all macro users data rate demands, while Reuse-1 scheme can even lead up to 40 % outage when control region of the small cells in heavily loaded

Efficient Resource Allocation and Sectorization for Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) in LTE Femtocell Systems

The Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) is a resource allocation technique that can effectively mitigate inter-cell interference (ICI) in LTE based HetNets and it is a promising solution. Various FFR schemes have been suggested to address the challenge of interference in femtocell systems. In this paper, we study the scopes of interference mitigation and capacity improvement. We propose a resource allocation scheme that gradually varies frequency resource share with distance from the eNodeB for both macrocells and femtocells in order to attain better utilization of the resources. This is performed effectively using three layers in the cell. The proposal also employs high number sectors in a cell, low interference and good frequency reuse. Monte-Carlo simulations are performed, which show that the proposed scheme achieves significantly better throughput compared to the existing FFR schemes

Fractional frequency reused based interference mitigation in irregular geometry multicellular networks

Recent drastic growth in the mobile broadband services specifically with the proliferation of smart phones demands for higher spectrum capacity of wireless cellular systems. Due to the scarcity of the frequency spectrum, cellular systems are seeking aggressive frequency reuse, which improve the network capacity, however, at the expense of increased Inter Cell Interference (ICI). Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) scheme has been acknowledged as an effective ICI mitigation scheme, however, in literature FFR has been used mostly in perfect geometry network. In realistic deployment, the cellular geometry is irregular and each cell experiences varying ICI. The main objective of this thesis is to develop ICI mitigation scheme that improves spectrum efficiency and throughput for irregular geometry multicellular network. Irregular Geometry Sectored-Fractional Frequency Reuse (IGS-FFR) scheme is developed that comprises of cell partitioning and sectoring, and dynamic spectrum partitioning. The cell-partitioning and sectoring allows full frequency reuse within an irregular geometry cell. Nevertheless, the sub-regions in an irregular cell have varying coverage areas and thus demands diverse spectrum requirements. The IGSFFR scheme is designed to dynamically allocate the spectrum resources according to the traffic demands of each sub-region. An enhanced IGS-FFR has been developed to optimally allocate the spectrum resources to individual users of each sub-region. Enhanced IGS-FFR has been realized using two different approaches, Auction based Optimized IGS-FFR (AO-IGS-FFR) and Hungarian based Optimized IGS-FFR (HO-IGS-FFR). The results show that IGS-FFR has significantly improved the cell throughput by 89%, 45% and 18% and users’ satisfaction by 112%, 65.8% and 38% compared to Reuse-1, Strict-FFR and FFR-3 schemes, respectively. The findings show that the ICI mitigation in IGS-FFR is reinforced by users’ satisfaction. As the number of sectors in IGS-FFR increases from 3 to 4 and 6, the cell throughput increase by 21% and 33% because of spatial diversity exploitation along with orthogonal sub-band allocation. AO-IGS-FFR and HO-IGS-FFR have further improved the cell throughput of the basic FFR-3 by 65% and 72.2%, respectively. HO-IGS-FFR performs 7% better than the AO-IGS-FFR at the expense of 26.7% decrease in the users’ satisfaction and excessive complexity. Although, AO-IGS-FFR compromises sub-optimal bandwidth allocation, it is a low complexity scheme and can mitigate ICI with high users’ satisfaction. The enhanced IGS-FFR can be deployed in future heterogeneous irregular geometry multicellular OFDMA networks