231,100 research outputs found
SDN/NFV-enabled satellite communications networks: opportunities, scenarios and challenges
In the context of next generation 5G networks, the satellite industry is clearly committed to revisit and revamp the role of satellite communications. As major drivers in the evolution of (terrestrial) fixed and mobile networks, Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualisation (NFV) technologies are also being positioned as central technology enablers towards improved and more flexible integration of satellite and terrestrial segments, providing satellite network further service innovation and business agility by advanced network resources management techniques. Through the analysis of scenarios and use cases, this paper provides a description of the benefits that SDN/NFV technologies can bring into satellite communications towards 5G. Three scenarios are presented and analysed to delineate different potential improvement areas pursued through the introduction of SDN/NFV technologies in the satellite ground segment domain. Within each scenario, a number of use cases are developed to gain further insight into specific capabilities and to identify the technical challenges stemming from them.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Exploiting Interference Alignment in Multi-Cell Cooperative OFDMA Resource Allocation
This paper studies interference alignment (IA) based multi-cell cooperative
resource allocation for the downlink OFDMA with universal frequency reuse.
Unlike the traditional scheme that treats subcarriers as separate dimensions
for resource allocation, the IA technique is utilized to enable
frequency-domain precoding over parallel subcarriers. In this paper, the joint
optimization of frequency-domain precoding via IA, subcarrier user selection
and power allocation is investigated for a cooperative three-cell OFDMA system
to maximize the downlink throughput. Numerical results for a simplified
symmetric channel setup reveal that the IA-based scheme achieves notable
throughput gains over the traditional scheme only when the inter-cell
interference link has a comparable strength as the direct link, and the
receiver SNR is sufficiently large. Motivated by this observation, a practical
hybrid scheme is proposed for cellular systems with heterogenous channel
conditions, where the total spectrum is divided into two subbands, over which
the IAbased scheme and the traditional scheme are applied for resource
allocation to users located in the cell-intersection region and cellnon-
intersection region, respectively. It is shown that this hybrid resource
allocation scheme flexibly exploits the downlink IA gains for OFDMA-based
cellular systems.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, GC2011 conferenc
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