Separation Framework: An Enabler for Cooperative and D2D Communication for Future 5G Networks

Soaring capacity and coverage demands dictate that future cellular networks need to soon migrate towards ultra-dense networks. However, network densification comes with a host of challenges that include compromised energy efficiency, complex interference management, cumbersome mobility management, burdensome signaling overheads and higher backhaul costs. Interestingly, most of the problems, that beleaguer network densification, stem from legacy networks' one common feature i.e., tight coupling between the control and data planes regardless of their degree of heterogeneity and cell density. Consequently, in wake of 5G, control and data planes separation architecture (SARC) has recently been conceived as a promising paradigm that has potential to address most of aforementioned challenges. In this article, we review various proposals that have been presented in literature so far to enable SARC. More specifically, we analyze how and to what degree various SARC proposals address the four main challenges in network densification namely: energy efficiency, system level capacity maximization, interference management and mobility management. We then focus on two salient features of future cellular networks that have not yet been adapted in legacy networks at wide scale and thus remain a hallmark of 5G, i.e., coordinated multipoint (CoMP), and device-to-device (D2D) communications. After providing necessary background on CoMP and D2D, we analyze how SARC can particularly act as a major enabler for CoMP and D2D in context of 5G. This article thus serves as both a tutorial as well as an up to date survey on SARC, CoMP and D2D. Most importantly, the article provides an extensive outlook of challenges and opportunities that lie at the crossroads of these three mutually entangled emerging technologies.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 201

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

A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

A heterogeneous short-range communication platform for internet of vehicles

The automotive industry is rapidly accelerating toward the development of innovative industry applications that feature management capabilities for data and applications alike in cars. In this regard, more internet of vehicles solutions are emerging through advancements of various wireless medium access-control technologies and the internet of things. In the present work, we develop a short-range communication–based vehicular system to support vehicle communication and remote car control. We present a combined hardware and software testbed that is capable of controlling a vehicle’s start-up, operation and several related functionalities covering various vehicle metric data. The testbed is built from two microcontrollers, Arduino and Raspberry Pi 3, each of which individually controls certain functions to improve the overall vehicle control. The implementation of the heterogeneous communication module is based on the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.11 and IEEE 802.15 medium access control technologies. Further, a control module on a smartphone was designed and implemented for efficient management. Moreover, we study the system connectivity performance by measuring various important parameters including the coverage distance, signal strength, download speed and latency. This study covers the use of this technology setup in different geographical areas over various time spans

A Cross Layer Routing Protocol for OFDMA Based Mobile Ad Hoc Networks.

PhDMobile ad hoc networks are of growing interest because of their unique characteristics and advantages in many practical applications. QoS provision acts as a major challenge in the routing protocol design in the real-world mobile ad hoc networks, especially for the real-time services. OFDM is a new technology which has many advantages over the other modulation schemes. Because of its prominent features, many popular wireless standards have adopted it as physical layer modulation, such as IEEE 802.11 series, WiMAX, 3GPP LTE etc, and it is extended to multiuser environment known as OFDMA. So far none of the existing ad hoc routing protocols fully account for the OFDMA based mobile ad hoc networks. In this thesis, a QoS routing protocol is proposed for OFDMA based mobile ad hoc networks. A signal strength-based sub-channel allocation scheme is proposed in the routing protocol aiming to reduce the signalling overhead and cochannel interference. The performance of the proposed routing protocol is compared with other alternative proposals through simulations using OPNET simulator. Moreover, a partial time synchronization and a null subcarrier based frequency synchronization algorithms are also proposed for OFDMA based ad hoc network to further support and facilitate the proposed sub-channel allocation scheme and routing protocol

Cooperative control of relay based cellular networks

PhDThe increasing popularity of wireless communications and the higher data requirements of new types of service lead to higher demands on wireless networks. Relay based cellular networks have been seen as an effective way to meet users’ increased data rate requirements while still retaining the benefits of a cellular structure. However, maximizing the probability of providing service and spectrum efficiency are still major challenges for network operators and engineers because of the heterogeneous traffic demands, hard-to-predict user movements and complex traffic models. In a mobile network, load balancing is recognised as an efficient way to increase the utilization of limited frequency spectrum at reasonable costs. Cooperative control based on geographic load balancing is employed to provide flexibility for relay based cellular networks and to respond to changes in the environment. According to the potential capability of existing antenna systems, adaptive radio frequency domain control in the physical layer is explored to provide coverage at the right place at the right time. This thesis proposes several effective and efficient approaches to improve spectrum efficiency using network wide optimization to coordinate the coverage offered by different network components according to the antenna models and relay station capability. The approaches include tilting of antenna sectors, changing the power of omni-directional antennas, and changing the assignment of relay stations to different base stations. Experiments show that the proposed approaches offer significant improvements and robustness in heterogeneous traffic scenarios and when the propagation environment changes. The issue of predicting the consequence of cooperative decisions regarding antenna configurations when applied in a realistic environment is described, and a coverage prediction model is proposed. The consequences of applying changes to the antenna configuration on handovers are analysed in detail. The performance evaluations are based on a system level simulator in the context of Mobile WiMAX technology, but the concepts apply more generally