Wireless Communications in the Era of Big Data

The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adaptable for managing the bigdata traffic in wireless networks. On the other hand, instead of viewing mobile bigdata as a unwanted burden, we introduce methods to capitalize from the vast data traffic, for building a bigdata-aware wireless network with better wireless service quality and new mobile applications. We highlight several promising future research directions for wireless communications in the mobile bigdata era.Comment: This article is accepted and to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

On the Design of a Novel Joint Network-Channel Coding Scheme for the Multiple Access Relay Channel

This paper proposes a novel joint non-binary network-channel code for the Time-Division Decode-and-Forward Multiple Access Relay Channel (TD-DF-MARC), where the relay linearly combines -- over a non-binary finite field -- the coded sequences from the source nodes. A method based on an EXIT chart analysis is derived for selecting the best coefficients of the linear combination. Moreover, it is shown that for different setups of the system, different coefficients should be chosen in order to improve the performance. This conclusion contrasts with previous works where a random selection was considered. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed scheme outperforms, in terms of its gap to the outage probabilities, the previously published joint network-channel coding approaches. Besides, this gain is achieved by using very short-length codewords, which makes the scheme particularly attractive for low-latency applications.Comment: 28 pages, 9 figures; Submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Special Issue on Theories and Methods for Advanced Wireless Relays, 201

Closed-Form Error Probability of Network-Coded Cooperative Wireless Networks with Channel-Aware Detectors

International audienceIn this paper, we propose a simple analytical methodology to study the performance of multi-source multi-relay cooperative wireless networks with network coding at the relay nodes and Maximum-Likelihood (ML-) optimum channel-aware detectors at the destination. Channel-aware detectors are a broad class of receivers that account for possible decoding errors at the relays, and, thus, are inherently designed to mitigate the effect of erroneous forwarded and network-coded data. In spite of the analytical complexity of the problem at hand, the proposed framework turns out to be simple enough yet accurate and insightful to understand the behavior of the system, and, in particular, to capture advantages and disadvantages of various network codes and the impact of error propagation on their performance. It is shown that, with the help of cooperation, some network codes are inherently more robust to decoding errors at the relays, while others better exploit the inherent spatial diversity and redundancy provided by cooperative networking. Finally, theory and simulation highlight that the relative advantage of a network code with respect to the others might be different with and without decoding errors at the relays