SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Cross-layer scheduling and resource allocation for heterogeneous traffic in 3G LTE

3G long term evolution (LTE) introduces stringent needs in order to provide different kinds of traffic with Quality of Service (QoS) characteristics. The major problem with this nature of LTE is that it does not have any paradigm scheduling algorithm that will ideally control the assignment of resources which in turn will improve the user satisfaction. This has become an open subject and different scheduling algorithms have been proposed which are quite challenging and complex. To address this issue, in this paper, we investigate how our proposed algorithm improves the user satisfaction for heterogeneous traffic, that is, best-effort traffic such as file transfer protocol (FTP) and real-time traffic such as voice over internet protocol (VoIP). Our proposed algorithm is formulated using the cross-layer technique. The goal of our proposed algorithm is to maximize the expected total user satisfaction (total-utility) under different constraints. We compared our proposed algorithm with proportional fair (PF), exponential proportional fair (EXP-PF), and U-delay. Using simulations, our proposed algorithm improved the performance of real-time traffic based on throughput, VoIP delay, and VoIP packet loss ratio metrics while PF improved the performance of best-effort traffic based on FTP traffic received, FTP packet loss ratio, and FTP throughput metrics

MECC scheduling algorithm in vehicular environment for uplink transmission in LTE networks

Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) is chosen because of the lower peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) value in uplink transmission. However, the contiguity constraint is one of the major constraint presents in uplink packet scheduling, where all RBs allocated to a single UE must be contiguous in the frequency-domain within each time slot to maintain its single carrier. This paper proposed an uplink-scheduling algorithm namely the Maximum Expansion with Contiguity Constraints (MECC) algorithm, which supports both the RT and NRT services. The MECC algorithm is deployed in two stages. In the first stage, the RBs are allocated fairly among the UEs. The second stage allocates the RBs with the highest metric value and expands the allocation on both sides of the matrix, M with respect to the contiguity constraint. The performance of the MECC algorithm was observed in terms of throughput, fairness, delay, and Packet Loss Ratio (PLR) for VoIP, video and best effort flows. The MECC scheduling algorithm is compared to other algorithms namely the Round Robin (RR), Channel-Dependent First Maximum Expansion (CD-FME), and Proportional Fairness First Maximum Expansion (PF-FME). From here, it can be concluded that the MECC algorithm shows the best results among other algorithms by delivering the highest throughput which is up to 81.29% and 90.04% than CD-FME and RR scheduler for RT and NRT traffic respectively, having low PLR and delay which is up to 93.92% and 56.22% of improvement than CD-FME for the RT traffic flow. The MECC also has a satisfactory level of fairness for the cell-edge users in a vehicular environment of LTE network