Joint Scheduling and ARQ for MU-MIMO Downlink in the Presence of Inter-Cell Interference

User scheduling and multiuser multi-antenna (MU-MIMO) transmission are at the core of high rate data-oriented downlink schemes of the next-generation of cellular systems (e.g., LTE-Advanced). Scheduling selects groups of users according to their channels vector directions and SINR levels. However, when scheduling is applied independently in each cell, the inter-cell interference (ICI) power at each user receiver is not known in advance since it changes at each new scheduling slot depending on the scheduling decisions of all interfering base stations. In order to cope with this uncertainty, we consider the joint operation of scheduling, MU-MIMO beamforming and Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ). We develop a game-theoretic framework for this problem and build on stochastic optimization techniques in order to find optimal scheduling and ARQ schemes. Particularizing our framework to the case of "outage service rates", we obtain a scheme based on adaptive variable-rate coding at the physical layer, combined with ARQ at the Logical Link Control (ARQ-LLC). Then, we present a novel scheme based on incremental redundancy Hybrid ARQ (HARQ) that is able to achieve a throughput performance arbitrarily close to the "genie-aided service rates", with no need for a genie that provides non-causally the ICI power levels. The novel HARQ scheme is both easier to implement and superior in performance with respect to the conventional combination of adaptive variable-rate coding and ARQ-LLC.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Communications, v2: small correction

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Distributed Multicell Beamforming Design Approaching Pareto Boundary with Max-Min Fairness

This paper addresses coordinated downlink beamforming optimization in multicell time-division duplex (TDD) systems where a small number of parameters are exchanged between cells but with no data sharing. With the goal to reach the point on the Pareto boundary with max-min rate fairness, we first develop a two-step centralized optimization algorithm to design the joint beamforming vectors. This algorithm can achieve a further sum-rate improvement over the max-min optimal performance, and is shown to guarantee max-min Pareto optimality for scenarios with two base stations (BSs) each serving a single user. To realize a distributed solution with limited intercell communication, we then propose an iterative algorithm by exploiting an approximate uplink-downlink duality, in which only a small number of positive scalars are shared between cells in each iteration. Simulation results show that the proposed distributed solution achieves a fairness rate performance close to the centralized algorithm while it has a better sum-rate performance, and demonstrates a better tradeoff between sum-rate and fairness than the Nash Bargaining solution especially at high signal-to-noise ratio.Comment: 8 figures. To Appear in IEEE Trans. Wireless Communications, 201

Security versus Reliability Analysis of Opportunistic Relaying

Physical-layer security is emerging as a promising paradigm of securing wireless communications against eavesdropping between legitimate users, when the main link spanning from source to destination has better propagation conditions than the wiretap link from source to eavesdropper. In this paper, we identify and analyze the tradeoffs between the security and reliability of wireless communications in the presence of eavesdropping attacks. Typically, the reliability of the main link can be improved by increasing the source's transmit power (or decreasing its date rate) to reduce the outage probability, which unfortunately increases the risk that an eavesdropper succeeds in intercepting the source message through the wiretap link, since the outage probability of the wiretap link also decreases when a higher transmit power (or lower date rate) is used. We characterize the security-reliability tradeoffs (SRT) of conventional direct transmission from source to destination in the presence of an eavesdropper, where the security and reliability are quantified in terms of the intercept probability by an eavesdropper and the outage probability experienced at the destination, respectively. In order to improve the SRT, we then propose opportunistic relay selection (ORS) and quantify the attainable SRT improvement upon increasing the number of relays. It is shown that given the maximum tolerable intercept probability, the outage probability of our ORS scheme approaches zero for $N \to \infty$, where $N$ is the number of relays. Conversely, given the maximum tolerable outage probability, the intercept probability of our ORS scheme tends to zero for $N \to \infty$.Comment: 9 pages. IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 201

Faster Information Propagation on Highways: a Virtual MIMO Approach

In vehicular communications, traffic-related information should be spread over the network as quickly as possible to maintain a safe and reliable transportation system. This motivates us to develop more efficient information propagation schemes. In this paper, we propose a novel cluster-based cooperative information forwarding scheme, in which the vehicles opportunistically form virtual antenna arrays to boost one-hop transmission range and therefore accelerate information propagation along the highway. Both closed-form results of the transmission range gain and the improved Information Propagation Speed (IPS) are derived and verified by simulations. It is observed that the proposed scheme demonstrates the most significant IPS gain in moderate traffic scenarios, whereas too dense or too sparse vehicle density results in less gain. Moreover, it is also shown that increased mobility offers more contact opportunities and thus facilitates information propagation.Comment: IEEE 2014 Global Telecommunications Conference (GLOBECOM 2014) - Communication Theory Symposiu

Improved Information Outage Rate in Certain MIMO Systems

We propose a simple class of encoding/decoding techniques which can be used to improve the information outage rate of certain multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Gains in outage rate can be achieved at low to moderate signal to noise ratios in MIMO systems which have fewer receive antennas than transmit antennas. This performance improvement is due to extra ``virtual'' receive antennas which are created with low complexity signal processing. A simple space-time block code system using virtual receive antennas is also investigated