Packet Scheduling Algorithms in LTE/LTE-A cellular Networks: Multi-agent Q-learning Approach

Spectrum utilization is vital for mobile operators. It ensures an efficient use of spectrum bands, especially when obtaining their license is highly expensive. Long Term Evolution (LTE), and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) spectrum bands license were auctioned by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) to mobile operators with hundreds of millions of dollars. In the first part of this dissertation, we study, analyze, and compare the QoS performance of QoS-aware/Channel-aware packet scheduling algorithms while using CA over LTE, and LTE-A heterogeneous cellular networks. This included a detailed study of the LTE/LTE-A cellular network and its features, and the modification of an open source LTE simulator in order to perform these QoS performance tests. In the second part of this dissertation, we aim to solve spectrum underutilization by proposing, implementing, and testing two novel multi-agent Q-learning-based packet scheduling algorithms for LTE cellular network. The Collaborative Competitive scheduling algorithm, and the Competitive Competitive scheduling algorithm. These algorithms schedule licensed users over the available radio resources and un-licensed users over spectrum holes. In conclusion, our results show that the spectrum band could be utilized by deploying efficient packet scheduling algorithms for licensed users, and can be further utilized by allowing unlicensed users to be scheduled on spectrum holes whenever they occur

Quality-driven resource utilization methods for video streaming in wireless communication networks

This research is focused on the optimisation of resource utilisation in wireless mobile networks with the consideration of the users’ experienced quality of video streaming services. The study specifically considers the new generation of mobile communication networks, i.e. 4G-LTE, as the main research context. The background study provides an overview of the main properties of the relevant technologies investigated. These include video streaming protocols and networks, video service quality assessment methods, the infrastructure and related functionalities of LTE, and resource allocation algorithms in mobile communication systems. A mathematical model based on an objective and no-reference quality assessment metric for video streaming, namely Pause Intensity, is developed in this work for the evaluation of the continuity of streaming services. The analytical model is verified by extensive simulation and subjective testing on the joint impairment effects of the pause duration and pause frequency. Various types of the video contents and different levels of the impairments have been used in the process of validation tests. It has been shown that Pause Intensity is closely correlated with the subjective quality measurement in terms of the Mean Opinion Score and this correlation property is content independent. Based on the Pause Intensity metric, an optimised resource allocation approach is proposed for the given user requirements, communication system specifications and network performances. This approach concerns both system efficiency and fairness when establishing appropriate resource allocation algorithms, together with the consideration of the correlation between the required and allocated data rates per user. Pause Intensity plays a key role here, representing the required level of Quality of Experience (QoE) to ensure the best balance between system efficiency and fairness. The 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) system is used as the main application environment where the proposed research framework is examined and the results are compared with existing scheduling methods on the achievable fairness, efficiency and correlation. Adaptive video streaming technologies are also investigated and combined with our initiatives on determining the distribution of QoE performance across the network. The resulting scheduling process is controlled through the prioritization of users by considering their perceived quality for the services received. Meanwhile, a trade-off between fairness and efficiency is maintained through an online adjustment of the scheduler’s parameters. Furthermore, Pause Intensity is applied to act as a regulator to realise the rate adaptation function during the end user’s playback of the adaptive streaming service. The adaptive rates under various channel conditions and the shape of the QoE distribution amongst the users for different scheduling policies have been demonstrated in the context of LTE. Finally, the work for interworking between mobile communication system at the macro-cell level and the different deployments of WiFi technologies throughout the macro-cell is presented. A QoEdriven approach is proposed to analyse the offloading mechanism of the user’s data (e.g. video traffic) while the new rate distribution algorithm reshapes the network capacity across the macrocell. The scheduling policy derived is used to regulate the performance of the resource allocation across the fair-efficient spectrum. The associated offloading mechanism can properly control the number of the users within the coverages of the macro-cell base station and each of the WiFi access points involved. The performance of the non-seamless and user-controlled mobile traffic offloading (through the mobile WiFi devices) has been evaluated and compared with that of the standard operator-controlled WiFi hotspots

Fairness-Oriented and QoS-Aware Radio Resource Management in OFDMA Packet Radio Networks: Practical Algorithms and System Performance

During the last two decades, wireless technologies have demonstrated their importance in people’s personal communications but also as one of the fundamental drivers of economic growth, first in the form of cellular networks (2G, 3G and beyond) and more recently in terms of wireless computer networks (e.g. Wi-Fi,) and wireless Internet connectivity. Currently, the development of new packet radio systems is evolving, most notably in terms of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced, in order to utilize the available radio spectrum as efficiently as possible. Therefore, advanced radio resource management (RRM) techniques have an important role in current and emerging future mobile networks. In all wireless systems, the data throughput and the average data delay performance, especially in case of best effort services, are greatly degraded when the traffic-load in the system is high. This is because the radio resources (time, frequency and space) are shared by multiple users. Another big problem is that the transmission performance can vary heavily between different users, since the channel state greatly depends on the communication environment and changes therein. To solve these challenges, new major technology innovations are needed. This thesis considers new practical fairness-oriented and quality-of-service (QoS) -aware RRM algorithms in OFDMA-based packet radio networks. Moreover, using UTRAN LTE radio network as application example, we focus on analyzing and enhancing the system-level performance by utilizing state-of-the-art waveform and radio link developments combined with advanced radio resource management methods. The presented solutions as part of RRM framework consist of efficient packet scheduling, link adaptation, power control, admission control and retransmission mechanisms. More specifically, several novel packet scheduling algorithms are proposed and analyzed to address these challenges. This dissertation deals specifically with the problems of QoS provisioning and fair radio resource distribution among users with limited channel feedback, admission and power control in best effort and video streaming type traffic scenarios, and the resulting system-level performance. The work and developments are practically-oriented taking aspects like finite channel state information (CSI), reporting delays and retransmissions into account. Consequently, the multi-user diversity gain with opportunistic frequency domain packet scheduling (FDPS) is further explored in spatial domain by taking the multiantenna techniques and spatial division multiplexing functionalities into account. Validation and analysis of the proposed solutions is performed through extensive system level simulations modeling the behavior and operation of a complete multiuser cell in the overall network. Based on the obtained performance results, it is confirmed that greatly improved fairness can be fairly easily built in to the scheduling algorithm and other RRM mechanisms without considerably degrading e.g. the average cell throughput. Moreover, effective QoS-provisioning framework in video streaming type traffic scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the presented solutions as increased system capacity measured in terms of the number of users or parallel streaming services supported simultaneously by the network

Eficiência energética avançada para sistema OFDMA CoMP coordenação multiponto

Doutoramento em Engenharia EletrotécnicaThe ever-growing energy consumption in mobile networks stimulated by the expected growth in data tra ffic has provided the impetus for mobile operators to refocus network design, planning and deployment towards reducing the cost per bit, whilst at the same time providing a signifi cant step towards reducing their operational expenditure. As a step towards incorporating cost-eff ective mobile system, 3GPP LTE-Advanced has adopted the coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission technique due to its ability to mitigate and manage inter-cell interference (ICI). Using CoMP the cell average and cell edge throughput are boosted. However, there is room for reducing energy consumption further by exploiting the inherent exibility of dynamic resource allocation protocols. To this end packet scheduler plays the central role in determining the overall performance of the 3GPP longterm evolution (LTE) based on packet-switching operation and provide a potential research playground for optimizing energy consumption in future networks. In this thesis we investigate the baseline performance for down link CoMP using traditional scheduling approaches, and subsequently go beyond and propose novel energy e fficient scheduling (EES) strategies that can achieve power-e fficient transmission to the UEs whilst enabling both system energy effi ciency gain and fairness improvement. However, ICI can still be prominent when multiple nodes use common resources with di fferent power levels inside the cell, as in the so called heterogeneous networks (Het- Net) environment. HetNets are comprised of two or more tiers of cells. The rst, or higher tier, is a traditional deployment of cell sites, often referred to in this context as macrocells. The lower tiers are termed small cells, and can appear as microcell, picocells or femtocells. The HetNet has attracted signiffi cant interest by key manufacturers as one of the enablers for high speed data at low cost. Research until now has revealed several key hurdles that must be overcome before HetNets can achieve their full potential: bottlenecks in the backhaul must be alleviated, as well as their seamless interworking with CoMP. In this thesis we explore exactly the latter hurdle, and present innovative ideas on advancing CoMP to work in synergy with HetNet deployment, complemented by a novel resource allocation policy for HetNet tighter interference management. As system level simulator has been used to analyze the proposed algorithm/protocols, and results have concluded that up to 20% energy gain can be observed.O aumento do consumo de energia nas TICs e em particular nas redes de comunicação móveis, estimulado por um crescimento esperado do tráfego de dados, tem servido de impulso aos operadores m oveis para reorientarem os seus projectos de rede, planeamento e implementa ção no sentido de reduzir o custo por bit, o que ao mesmo tempo possibilita um passo signicativo no sentido de reduzir as despesas operacionais. Como um passo no sentido de uma incorporação eficaz em termos destes custos, o sistema móvel 3GPP LTE-Advanced adoptou a técnica de transmissão Coordenação Multi-Ponto (identificada na literatura com a sigla CoMP) devido à sua capacidade de mitigar e gerir Interferência entre Células (sigla ICI na literatura). No entanto a ICI pode ainda ser mais proeminente quando v arios n os no interior da célula utilizam recursos comuns com diferentes níveis de energia, como acontece nos chamados ambientes de redes heterogéneas (sigla Het- Net na literatura). As HetNets são constituídas por duas ou mais camadas de células. A primeira, ou camada superiora, constitui uma implantação tradicional de sítios de célula, muitas vezes referidas neste contexto como macrocells. Os níveis mais baixos são designados por células pequenas, e podem aparecer como microcells, picocells ou femtocells. A HetNet tem atra do grande interesse por parte dos principais fabricantes como sendo facilitador para transmissões de dados de alta velocidade a baixo custo. A investigação tem revelado at e a data, vários dos principais obstáculos que devem ser superados para que as HetNets possam atingir todo o seu potencial: (i) os estrangulamentos no backhaul devem ser aliviados; (ii) bem como sua perfeita interoperabilidade com CoMP. Nesta tese exploramos este ultimo constrangimento e apresentamos ideias inovadoras em como a t ecnica CoMP poder a ser aperfeiçoada por forma a trabalhar em sinergia com a implementação da HetNet, complementado ainda com uma nova perspectiva na alocação de recursos rádio para um controlo e gestão mais apertado de interferência nas HetNets. Com recurso a simulação a níível de sistema para analisar o desempenho dos algoritmos e protocolos propostos, os resultados obtidos concluíram que ganhos at e a ordem dos 20% poderão ser atingidos em termos de eficiência energética

Practical large-scale coordinated scheduling in LTE-Advanced networks

In LTE-Advanced, the same spectrum can be re-used in neighboring cells, hence coordinated scheduling is employed to improve the overall network performance (cell throughput, fairness, and energy efficiency) by reducing inter-cell interference. In this paper, we advocate that large-scale coordination can be obtained through a layered solution: a cluster of few (i.e., three) cells is coordinated at the first level, and clusters of coordinated cells are then coordinated at a larger scale (e.g., tens of cells). We model both small-scale coordination and large-scale coordination as optimization problems, show that solving them at optimality is prohibitive, and propose two efficient heuristics that achieve good results, and yet are simple enough to be run at every Transmission Time Interval (TTI). Detailed packet-level simulations show that our layered approach outperforms the existing ones, both static and dynamic

Resource Allocation in LTE Advanced for QoS and Energy Efficiency

Long Term Evolution (LTE) and LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) are establishing themselves as the new standard of 4G cellular networks in Europe and in several other parts of the world. Their success will largely depend on their ability to support Quality of Service for different types of users, at reasonable costs. The quality of service will depend on how effectively the cell bandwidth is shared among the users. The cost will depend – among many other factors – on how effectively we exploit the cell capacity. Being able to exploit bandwidth efficiently postpones the time when network upgrades are required. On the other hand, operation costs also depend on the energy efficiency of the cellular network, which should avoid wasting power when few users are connected. As for bandwidth efficiency, the recent LTE/LTE-A standards introduced MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) transmission modes, which allow both reliability and efficiency to be increased. MIMO can increase the throughput significantly. In a MIMO system, the selection of the MIMO transmission modes (whether Transmission Diversity, Spatial Multiplexing, or Multi-User MIMO) plays a key feature in determining the achievable rate and the error probability experienced by the users. MIMO-unaware scheduling policies, which neglect the transmission mode selection problem, do not perform well under MIMO. In the current literature, few MIMO-aware LTE-A scheduling policies have been designed. However, despite being proposed for LTE-A, these solutions do not take into account some constraints inherent to LTE-A, hence leading to unfeasible allocations. In this work, we propose a new framework for Transmission Mode Selection and Frequency. Domain Packet Scheduling, which is compliant with the constraints of the LTE-A standard. The resource allocation framework accommodates real-time requirements and fairness on demand, while the bulk of the resources are allocated in an opportunistic fashion, i.e. so as to maximize the cell throughput. Our results show that our proposal provides real-time connections with the desired level of QoS, without utterly sacrificing the cell throughput. As far as energy efficiency is concerned, we studied the problem of minimizing the RF power used by the eNodeB, while maintaining the same level of service for the users. We devised a provisioning framework that exploits the Multicast/Broadcast over a Single Frequency Network (MBSFN) mechanism to deactivate the eNodeB on some Transmission Time Intervals (TTI), and computes the minimum-power activation required for guaranteeing a given level of service. Our results show that the provisioning framework is stable, and that it allows significant savings with respect to an always-on policy, with marginal impact on the latency experienced by the users

Towards Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era: Recent Advances, Current Issues and Future Directions

Tactile Internet (TI) is envisioned to create a paradigm shift from the content-oriented communications to steer/control-based communications by enabling real-time transmission of haptic information (i.e., touch, actuation, motion, vibration, surface texture) over Internet in addition to the conventional audiovisual and data traffics. This emerging TI technology, also considered as the next evolution phase of Internet of Things (IoT), is expected to create numerous opportunities for technology markets in a wide variety of applications ranging from teleoperation systems and Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) to automotive safety and eHealthcare towards addressing the complex problems of human society. However, the realization of TI over wireless media in the upcoming Fifth Generation (5G) and beyond networks creates various non-conventional communication challenges and stringent requirements in terms of ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability, high data-rate connectivity, resource allocation, multiple access and quality-latency-rate tradeoff. To this end, this paper aims to provide a holistic view on wireless TI along with a thorough review of the existing state-of-the-art, to identify and analyze the involved technical issues, to highlight potential solutions and to propose future research directions. First, starting with the vision of TI and recent advances and a review of related survey/overview articles, we present a generalized framework for wireless TI in the Beyond 5G Era including a TI architecture, the main technical requirements, the key application areas and potential enabling technologies. Subsequently, we provide a comprehensive review of the existing TI works by broadly categorizing them into three main paradigms; namely, haptic communications, wireless AR/VR, and autonomous, intelligent and cooperative mobility systems. Next, potential enabling technologies across physical/Medium Access Control (MAC) and network layers are identified and discussed in detail. Also, security and privacy issues of TI applications are discussed along with some promising enablers. Finally, we present some open research challenges and recommend promising future research directions