A survey of self organisation in future cellular networks

This article surveys the literature over the period of the last decade on the emerging field of self organisation as applied to wireless cellular communication networks. Self organisation has been extensively studied and applied in adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks and autonomic computer networks; however in the context of wireless cellular networks, this is the first attempt to put in perspective the various efforts in form of a tutorial/survey. We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, projects and standards in self organising cellular networks. Additionally, we also aim to present a clear understanding of this active research area, identifying a clear taxonomy and guidelines for design of self organising mechanisms. We compare strength and weakness of existing solutions and highlight the key research areas for further development. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone willing to delve into research on self organisation in wireless cellular communication networks

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

A neural network propagation model for LoRaWAN and critical analysis with real-world measurements

Among the many technologies competing for the Internet of Things (IoT), one of the most promising and fast-growing technologies in this landscape is the Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN). Coverage of LoRa, one of the main IoT LPWAN technologies, has previously been studied for outdoor environments. However, this article focuses on end-to-end propagation in an outdoor–indoor scenario. This article will investigate how the reported and documented outdoor metrics are interpreted for an indoor environment. Furthermore, to facilitate network planning and coverage prediction, a novel hybrid propagation estimation method has been developed and examined. This hybrid model is comprised of an artificial neural network (ANN) and an optimized Multi-Wall Model (MWM). Subsequently, real-world measurements were collected and compared against different propagation models. For benchmarking, log-distance and COST231 models were used due to their simplicity. It was observed and concluded that: (a) the propagation of the LoRa Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) is limited to a much shorter range in this investigated environment compared with outdoor reports; (b) log-distance and COST231 models do not yield an accurate estimate of propagation characteristics for outdoor–indoor scenarios; (c) this lack of accuracy can be addressed by adjusting the COST231 model, to account for the outdoor propagation; (d) a feedforward neural network combined with a COST231 model improves the accuracy of the predictions. This work demonstrates practical results and provides an insight into the LoRaWAN’s propagation in similar scenarios. This could facilitate network planning for outdoor–indoor environments