Semi-persistent RRC protocol for machine-type communication devices in LTE networks

In this paper, we investigate the design of a radio resource control (RRC) protocol in the framework of long-term evolution (LTE) of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project regarding provision of low cost/complexity and low energy consumption machine-type communication (MTC), which is an enabling technology for the emerging paradigm of the Internet of Things. Due to the nature and envisaged battery-operated long-life operation of MTC devices without human intervention, energy efficiency becomes extremely important. This paper elaborates the state-of-the-art approaches toward addressing the challenge in relation to the low energy consumption operation of MTC devices, and proposes a novel RRC protocol design, namely, semi-persistent RRC state transition (SPRST), where the RRC state transition is no longer triggered by incoming traffic but depends on pre-determined parameters based on the traffic pattern obtained by exploiting the network memory. The proposed RRC protocol can easily co-exist with the legacy RRC protocol in the LTE. The design criterion of SPRST is derived and the signalling procedure is investigated accordingly. Based upon the simulation results, it is shown that the SPRST significantly reduces both the energy consumption and the signalling overhead while at the same time guarantees the quality of service requirements

User-oriented mobility management in cellular wireless networks

2020 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.Mobility Management (MM) in wireless mobile networks is a vital process to keep an individual User Equipment (UE) connected while moving within the network coverage area—this is required to keep the network informed about the UE's mobility (i.e., location changes). The network must identify the exact serving cell of a specific UE for the purpose of data-packet delivery. The two MM procedures that are necessary to localize a specific UE and deliver data packets to that UE are known as Tracking Area Update (TAU) and Paging, which are burdensome not only to the network resources but also UE's battery—the UE and network always initiate the TAU and Paging, respectively. These two procedures are used in current Long Term Evolution (LTE) and its next generation (5G) networks despite the drawback that it consumes bandwidth and energy. Because of potentially very high-volume traffic and increasing density of high-mobility UEs, the TAU/Paging procedure incurs significant costs in terms of the signaling overhead and the power consumption in the battery-limited UE. This problem will become even worse in 5G, which is expected to accommodate exceptional services, such as supporting mission-critical systems (close-to-zero latency) and extending battery lifetime (10 times longer). This dissertation examines and discusses a variety of solution schemes for both the TAU and Paging, emphasizing a new key design to accommodate 5G use cases. However, ongoing efforts are still developing new schemes to provide seamless connections to the ever-increasing density of high-mobility UEs. In this context and toward achieving 5G use cases, we propose a novel solution to solve the MM issues, named gNB-based UE Mobility Tracking (gNB-based UeMT). This solution has four features aligned with achieving 5G goals. First, the mobile UE will no longer trigger the TAU to report their location changes, giving much more power savings with no signaling overhead. Instead, second, the network elements, gNBs, take over the responsibility of Tracking and Locating these UE, giving always-known UE locations. Third, our Paging procedure is markedly improved over the conventional one, providing very fast UE reachability with no Paging messages being sent simultaneously. Fourth, our solution guarantees lightweight signaling overhead with very low Paging delay; our simulation studies show that it achieves about 92% reduction in the corresponding signaling overhead. To realize these four features, this solution adds no implementation complexity. Instead, it exploits the already existing LTE/5G communication protocols, functions, and measurement reports. Our gNB-based UeMT solution by design has the potential to deal with mission-critical applications. In this context, we introduce a new approach for mission-critical and public-safety communications. Our approach aims at emergency situations (e.g., natural disasters) in which the mobile wireless network becomes dysfunctional, partially or completely. Specifically, this approach is intended to provide swift network recovery for Search-and-Rescue Operations (SAROs) to search for survivors after large-scale disasters, which we call UE-based SAROs. These SAROs are based on the fact that increasingly almost everyone carries wireless mobile devices (UEs), which serve as human-based wireless sensors on the ground. Our UE-based SAROs are aimed at accounting for limited UE battery power while providing critical information to first responders, as follows: 1) generate immediate crisis maps for the disaster-impacted areas, 2) provide vital information about where the majority of survivors are clustered/crowded, and 3) prioritize the impacted areas to identify regions that urgently need communication coverage. UE-based SAROs offer first responders a vital tool to prioritize and manage SAROs efficiently and effectively in a timely manner

Technique d'accès pour la communication machine-à-machine dans LTE/LTE-A

Machine type communications is seen as a form of data communication, among devices and/or from devices to a set of servers, that do not necessarily require human interaction. However, it is challenging to accommodate MTC in LTE as a result of its specific characteristics and requirements. The aim of this thesis is to propose mechanisms and optimize the access layer techniques for MTC in LTE. For uplink access, we propose two methods to improve the performance of random access in terms of latency: a packet aggregation method and a Transmission Time Interval bundling scheme. To further reduce the uplink latency and enable massive number of connected device, we propose a new contention based access method (CBA) to bypass both the redundant signaling in the random access procedure and also the latency of regular scheduling. For downlink reception, we propose two methods to analyze the performance of discontinuous reception DRX mode for MTC applications: the first with the Poisson distribution and the second with the Pareto distribution for sporadic traffic. With the proposed models, the power saving factor and wake up latency can be accurately estimated for a given choice of DRX parameters, thus allowing to select the ones presenting the optimal tradeoff.Les communications de type machine-à-machine M2M sont considérées comme des formes de communication de données qui ne requièrent pas nécessairement d'interaction humaine. Cependant, ce type de communication n'est pas efficace dans les réseaux cellulaires, en raison de leurs caractéristiques spécifiques, telles que. L'objectif de cette thèse est de proposer des mécanismes et d'optimiser les techniques de la couche d'accès radio LTE pour les communications M2M. Pour l'accès au canal de liaison montante, nous proposons deux méthodes afin d'améliorer la performance d'accès aléatoire en terme de latence et de consommation énergétique: une méthode d'agrégation de paquets et une autre de transmission multiple pendant l'intervalle de temps de transmission. Afin de réduire encore plus le temps de latence de liaison montante et permettre une connexion d'un grand nombre de machines au réseau, nous proposons une nouvelle méthode d'accès basée sur la contention CBA pour éviter d'une part la signalisation redondante pour accéder au canal et d'autre part la latence de l'ordonnanceur. Pour la réception de liaison descendante, nous proposons deux méthodes pour analyser les performances du mécanisme de réception discontinu DRX pour les applications M2M: la première se base sur une distribution de Poisson, la suivante sur une distribution Pareto pour le trafic sporadique. Avec les modèles proposés, le facteur d'économie d’énergie et la latence pour transiter du mode sommeil au mode actif peuvent être estimés avec précision pour un choix donné de paramètres DRX, permettant ainsi de sélectionner ceux permettant d'atteindre le compromis optimal

Performance enhancement of wireless communication systems through QoS optimisation

Providing quality of service (QoS) in a communication network is essential but challenging, especially when the complexities of wireless and mobile networks are added. The issues of how to achieve the intended performances, such as reliability and efficiency, at the minimal resource cost for wireless communications and networking have not been fully addressed. In this dissertation, we have investigated different data transmission schemes in different wireless communication systems such as wireless sensor network, device-to-device communications and vehicular networks. We have focused on cooperative communications through relaying and proposed a method to maximise the QoS performance by finding optimum transmission schemes. Furthermore, the performance trade-offs that we have identified show that both cooperative and non-cooperative transmission schemes could have advantages as well as disadvantages in offering QoS. In the analytical approach, we have derived the closed-form expressions of the outage probability, throughput and energy efficiency for different transmission schemes in wireless and mobile networks, in addition to applying other QoS metrics such as packet delivery ratio, packet loss rate and average end-to-end delay. We have shown that multi-hop relaying through cooperative communications can outperform non-cooperative transmission schemes in many cases. Furthermore, we have also analysed the optimum required transmission power for different transmission ranges to obtain the maximum energy efficiency or maximum achievable data rate with the minimum outage probability and bit error rate in cellular network. The proposed analytical and modelling approaches are used in wireless sensor networks, device-to-device communications and vehicular networks. The results generated have suggested an adaptive transmission strategy where the system can decide when and how each of transmission schemes should be adopted to achieve the best performance in varied conditions. In addition, the system can also choose proper transmitting power levels under the changing transmission distance to increase and maintain the network reliability and system efficiency accordingly. Consequently, these functions will lead to the optimized QoS in a given network