A Survey of Cognitive Radio Access to TV White Spaces

Cognitive radio is being intensively researched as the enabling technology for license-exempt access to the so-called TV White Spaces (TVWS), large portions of spectrum in the UHF/VHF bands which become available on a geographical basis after digital switchover. Both in the US, and more recently, in the UK the regulators have given conditional endorsement to this new mode of access. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art in technology, regulation, and standardisation of cognitive access to TVWS. It examines the spectrum opportunity and commercial use cases associated with this form of secondary access

Integrated cellular and device-to-device networks

textDevice-to-device (D2D) networking enables direct discovery and communication between cellular subscribers that are in proximity, thus bypassing the base stations (BSs). In principle, exploiting direct communication between nearby mobile devices will improve spectrum utilization, overall throughput, and energy consumption, while enabling new peer-to-peer and location-based applications and services. D2D-enabled broadband communication technology is also required by public safety networks that must function when cellular networks are not available. Integrating D2D into cellular networks, however, poses many challenges and risks to the long-standing cellular architecture, which is centered around the BSs. This dissertation identifies outstanding technical challenges in D2D-enabled cellular networks and addresses them with novel models and fundamental analysis. First, this dissertation develops a baseline hybrid network model consisting of both ad hoc nodes and cellular infrastructure. This model uses Poisson point processes to model the random and unpredictable locations of mobile users. It also captures key features of multicast D2D including multicast receiver heterogeneity and retransmissions while being tractable for analytical purpose. Several important multicast D2D metrics including coverage probability, mean number of covered receivers per multicast session, and multicast throughput are analytically characterized under the proposed model. Second, D2D mode selection which means that a potential D2D pair can switch between direct and cellular modes is incorporated into the hybrid network model. The extended model is applied to study spectrum sharing between cellular and D2D communications. Two spectrum sharing models, overlay and underlay, are investigated under a unified analytical framework. Analytical rate expressions are derived and applied to optimize the design of spectrum sharing. It is found that, from an overall mean-rate perspective, both overlay and underlay bring performance improvements (vs. pure cellular). Third, the single-antenna hybrid network model is extended to multi-antenna transmission to study the interplay between massive MIMO (multi-input multiple-output) and underlaid D2D networking. The spectral efficiency of such multi-antenna hybrid networks is investigated under both perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) assumptions. Compared to the case without D2D, there is a loss in cellular spectral efficiency due to D2D underlay. With perfect CSI, the loss can be completely overcome if the number of canceled D2D interfering signals is scaled appropriately. With imperfect CSI, in addition to pilot contamination, a new asymptotic underlay contamination effect arises. Finally, motivated by the fact that transmissions in D2D discovery are usually not or imperfectly synchronized, this dissertation studies the effect of asynchronous multicarrier transmission and proposes a tractable signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) model. The proposed model is used to analytically characterize system-level performance of asynchronous wireless networks. The loss from lack of synchronization is quantified, and several solutions are proposed and compared to mitigate the loss.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Lightweight mobile and wireless systems: technologies, architectures, and services

1Department of Information and Communication Systems Engineering (ICSE), University of the Aegean, 81100 Mytilene, Greece 2Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI), University of Trento, 38123 Trento, Italy 3Department of Informatics, Alexander Technological Educational Institute of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, 574 00 Macedonia, Greece 4Centre Tecnologic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya (CTTC), 08860 Barcelona, Spain 5North Carolina State University (NCSU), Raleigh, NC 27695, US

Research on efficiency and privacy issues in wireless communication

Wireless spectrum is a limited resource that must be used efficiently. It is also a broadcast medium, hence, additional procedures are required to maintain communication over the wireless spectrum private. In this thesis, we investigate three key issues related to efficient use and privacy of wireless spectrum use. First, we propose GAVEL, a truthful short-term auction mechanism that enables efficient use of the wireless spectrum through the licensed shared access model. Second, we propose CPRecycle, an improved Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) receiver that retrieves useful information from the cyclic prefix for interference mitigation thus improving spectral efficiency. Third and finally, we propose WiFi Glass, an attack vector on home WiFi networks to infer private information about home occupants. First we consider, spectrum auctions. Existing short-term spectrum auctions do not satisfy all the features required for a heterogeneous spectrum market. We discover that this is due to the underlying auction format, the sealed bid auction. We propose GAVEL, a truthful auction mechanism, that is based on the ascending bid auction format, that avoids the pitfalls of existing auction mechanisms that are based on the sealed bid auction format. Using extensive simulations we observe that GAVEL can achieve better performance than existing mechanisms. Second, we study the use of cyclic prefix in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing. The cyclic prefix does contain useful information in the presence of interference. We discover that while the signal of interest is redundant in the cyclic prefix, the interference component varies significantly. We use this insight to design CPRecycle, an improved OFDM receiver that is capable of using the information in the cyclic prefix to mitigate various types of interference. It improves spectral efficiency by decoding packets in the presence of interference. CPRecycle require changes to the OFDM receiver and can be deployed in most networks today. Finally, home WiFi networks are considered private when encryption is enabled using WPA2. However, experiments conducted in real homes, show that the wireless activity on the home network can be used to infer occupancy and activity states such as sleeping and watching television. With this insight, we propose WiFi Glass, an attack vector that can be used to infer occupancy and activity states (limited to three activity classes), using only the passively sniffed WiFi signal from the home environment. Evaluation with real data shows that in most of the cases, only about 15 minutes of sniffed WiFi signal is required to infer private information, highlighting the need for countermeasures

D5.2 - Evaluation of Selected Measurement-based Techniques

Deliverable D5.2 del projecte FARAMIRPreprin

Unified Framework for Multicarrier and Multiple Access based on Generalized Frequency Division Multiplexing

The advancements in wireless communications are the key-enablers of new applications with stringent requirements in low-latency, ultra-reliability, high data rate, high mobility, and massive connectivity. Diverse types of devices, ranging from tiny sensors to vehicles, with different capabilities need to be connected under various channel conditions. Thus, modern connectivity and network techniques at all layers are essential to overcome these challenges. In particular, the physical layer (PHY) transmission is required to achieve certain link reliability, data rate, and latency. In modern digital communications systems, the transmission is performed by means of a digital signal processing module that derives analog hardware. The performance of the analog part is influenced by the quality of the hardware and the baseband signal denoted as waveform. In most of the modern systems such as fifth generation (5G) and WiFi, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is adopted as a favorite waveform due to its low-complexity advantages in terms of signal processing. However, OFDM requires strict requirements on hardware quality. Many devices are equipped with simplified analog hardware to reduce the cost. In this case, OFDM does not work properly as a result of its high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) and sensitivity to synchronization errors. To tackle these problems, many waveforms design have been recently proposed in the literature. Some of these designs are modified versions of OFDM or based on conventional single subcarrier. Moreover, multicarrier frameworks, such as generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM), have been proposed to realize varieties of conventional waveforms. Furthermore, recent studies show the potential of using non-conventional waveforms for increasing the link reliability with affordable complexity. Based on that, flexible waveforms and transmission techniques are necessary to adapt the system for different hardware and channel constraints in order to fulfill the applications requirements while optimizing the resources. The objective of this thesis is to provide a holistic view of waveforms and the related multiple access (MA) techniques to enable efficient study and evaluation of different approaches. First, the wireless communications system is reviewed with specific focus on the impact of hardware impairments and the wireless channel on the waveform design. Then, generalized model of waveforms and MA are presented highlighting various special cases. Finally, this work introduces low-complexity architectures for hardware implementation of flexible waveforms. Integrating such designs with software-defined radio (SDR) contributes to the development of practical real-time flexible PHY.:1 Introduction 1.1 Baseband transmission model 1.2 History of multicarrier systems 1.3 The state-of-the-art waveforms 1.4 Prior works related to GFDM 1.5 Objective and contributions 2 Fundamentals of Wireless Communications 2.1 Wireless communications system 2.2 RF transceiver 2.2.1 Digital-analogue conversion 2.2.2 QAM modulation 2.2.3 Effective channel 2.2.4 Hardware impairments 2.3 Waveform aspects 2.3.1 Single-carrier waveform 2.3.2 Multicarrier waveform 2.3.3 MIMO-Waveforms 2.3.4 Waveform performance metrics 2.4 Wireless Channel 2.4.1 Line-of-sight propagation 2.4.2 Multi path and fading process 2.4.3 General baseband statistical channel model 2.4.4 MIMO channel 2.5 Summary 3 Generic Block-based Waveforms 3.1 Block-based waveform formulation 3.1.1 Variable-rate multicarrier 3.1.2 General block-based multicarrier model 3.2 Waveform processing techniques 3.2.1 Linear and circular filtering 3.2.2 Windowing 3.3 Structured representation 3.3.1 Modulator 3.3.2 Demodulator 3.3.3 MIMO Waveform processing 3.4 Detection 3.4.1 Maximum-likelihood detection 3.4.2 Linear detection 3.4.3 Iterative Detection 3.4.4 Numerical example and insights 3.5 Summary 4 Generic Multiple Access Schemes 57 4.1 Basic multiple access and multiplexing schemes 4.1.1 Infrastructure network system model 4.1.2 Duplex schemes 4.1.3 Common multiplexing and multiple access schemes 4.2 General multicarrier-based multiple access 4.2.1 Design with fixed set of pulses 4.2.2 Computational model 4.2.3 Asynchronous multiple access 4.3 Summary 5 Time-Frequency Analyses of Multicarrier 5.1 General time-frequency representation 5.1.1 Block representation 5.1.2 Relation to Zak transform 5.2 Time-frequency spreading 5.3 Time-frequency block in LTV channel 5.3.1 Subcarrier and subsymbol numerology 5.3.2 Processing based on the time-domain signal 5.3.3 Processing based on the frequency-domain signal 5.3.4 Unified signal model 5.4 summary 6 Generalized waveforms based on time-frequency shifts 6.1 General time-frequency shift 6.1.1 Time-frequency shift design 6.1.2 Relation between the shifted pulses 6.2 Time-frequency shift in Gabor frame 6.2.1 Conventional GFDM 6.3 GFDM modulation 6.3.1 Filter bank representation 6.3.2 Block representation 6.3.3 GFDM matrix structure 6.3.4 GFDM demodulator 6.3.5 Alternative interpretation of GFDM 6.3.6 Orthogonal modulation and GFDM spreading 6.4 Summary 7 Modulation Framework: Architectures and Applications 7.1 Modem architectures 7.1.1 General modulation matrix structure 7.1.2 Run-time flexibility 7.1.3 Generic GFDM-based architecture 7.1.4 Flexible parallel multiplications architecture 7.1.5 MIMO waveform architecture 7.2 Extended GFDM framework 7.2.1 Architectures complexity and flexibility analysis 7.2.2 Number of multiplications 7.2.3 Hardware analysis 7.3 Applications of the extended GFDM framework 7.3.1 Generalized FDMA 7.3.2 Enchantment of OFDM system 7.4 Summary 7 Conclusions and Future work

マクロセルにオーバーレイするスモールセルのための層間干渉低減に関する研究

The huge number of mobile terminals in use and the radio frequency scarceness are the relevant issues for future wireless communications. Frequency sharing has been considered to solve the problem. Addressing the issues has led to a wide adoption of small cell networks particularly femtocells overlaid onto macrocell or small cells implemented with the support of distributed antenna systems (DASs). Small cell networks improve link quality and frequency reuse. Spectrum sharing improves the usage efficiency of the licensed spectrum. A macrocell underlaid with femtocells constitutes a typical two-tier network for improving spectral efficiency and indoor coverage in a spectrum sharing environment. Considering the end-user access control over the small cell base station (SBS), with shared usage of the macrocell’s spectrum, this dissertation contribution is an investigation of mitigation techniques of crosstier interference. Such cross-tier interference mitigation leads to possible implementation of multi-tier and heterogeneous networks. The above arguments underpin our work which is presented in the hereby dissertation. The contributions in this thesis are three-fold. Our first contribution is an interference cancellation scheme based on the transmitter symbols fed back to the femtocell base station (FBS) undergoing harmful cross-tier interference. We propose a cross-tier interference management between the FBS and the macrocell base station (MBS) in uplink communications. Our proposal uses the network infrastructure for interference cancellation at the FBS. Besides, we profit from terminal discovery to derive the interference level from the femtocell to the macrocell. Thus, additionally, we propose an interference avoidance method based on power control without cooperation from the MBS. In our second contribution, we dismiss the use of the MBS for symbol feedback due to delay issues. In a multi-tier cellular communication system, the interference from one tier to another, denoted as cross-tier interference, is a limiting factor for the system performance. In spectrum-sharing usage, we consider the uplink cross-tier interference management of heterogeneous networks using femtocells overlaid onto the macrocell. We propose a variation of the cellular architecture and introduce a novel femtocell clustering based on interference cancellation to enhance the sum rate capacity. Our proposal is to use a DAS as an interface to mitigate the cross-tier interference between the macrocell and femtocell tiers. In addition, the DAS can forward the recovered data to the macrocell base station (MBS); thus, the macrocell user can reduce its transmit power to reach a remote antenna unit (RAU) located closer than the MBS. By distributing the RAUs within the macrocell coverage, the proposed scheme can mitigate the cross-tier interference at different locations for several femtocell clusters. Finally, we address the issue of cross-tier interference mitigation in heterogeneous cognitive small cell networks comparing equal and unequal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) branches in multi-input multi-output (MIMO) Alamouti scheme. Small cell networks enhance spectrum efficiency by handling the indoor traffic of mobile networks on a frequency-reuse operation. Because most of the current mobile traffic happens indoor, we introduce a prioritization shift by imposing a threshold on the outage generated by the outdoor mobile system to the indoor small cells. New closed-form expressions are derived to validate the proposed bit error rate (BER) function used in our optimization algorithm. We propose a joint transmit antenna selection and power allocation which minimizes the proposed BER function of the outdoor mobile terminal. The optimization is constrained by the outage at the small cell located near the cooperating transmit relays. Such constraint improves the initialization of the iterative algorithm compared to randomly choosing initial points. The proposed optimization yields a dynamic selection of the relays with power control pertaining to the outdoor mobile terminal performance.電気通信大学201

Hybrid Access Control Mechanism in Two-Tier Femtocell Networks

The cellular industry is undergoing a major paradigm shift from voice-centric, structured homogeneous networks to a more data-driven, distributed and heterogeneous architecture. One of the more promising trends emerging from this cellular revolution is femtocells. Femtocells are primarily viewed as a cost-effective way to improve both capacity and indoor coverage, and they enable offloading data-traffic from macrocell network. However, efficient interference management in co-channel deployment of femtocells remains a challenge. Decentralized strategies such as femtocell access control have been identified as an effective means to mitigate cross-tier interference in two-tier networks. Femtocells can be configured to be either open access or closed access. Prior work on access control schemes show that, in the absence of any coordination between the two tiers in terms of power control and user scheduling, closed access is the preferred approach at high user densities. Present methods suggest that in the case of orthogonal multiple access schemes like TDMA/OFDMA, femtocell access control should be adaptive according to the estimated cellular user density. The approach we follow, in this work, is to adopt an open access policy at the femtocell access points with a cap on the maximum number of users allowed on a femtocell. This ensures the femto owner retains a significant portion of the femtocell resources. We design an iterative algorithm for hybrid access control for femtocells that integrates the problems of uplink power control and base station assignment. This algorithm implicitly adapts the femtocell access method to the current user density. The distributed power control algorithm, which is based on Yates' work on standard interference functions, enables users to overcome the interference in the system and satisfy their minimum QoS requirements. The optimal allocation of femtocell resources is incorporated into the access control algorithm through a constrained sum-rate maximization to protect the femto owner from starvation at high user densities. The performance of a two-tier OFDMA femtocell network is then evaluated under the proposed access scheme from a home owner viewpoint, and network operator perspective. System-level simulations show that the proposed access control method can provide a rate gain of nearly 52% for cellular users, compared to closed access, at high user densities and under moderate-to-dense deployment of femtocells. At the same time, the femto owner is prevented from going into outage and only experiences a negligible rate loss. The results obtained establish the quantitative performance advantage of using hybrid access at femtocells with power control at high user densities. The convergence properties of the proposed iterative hybrid access control algorithm are also investigated by varying the user density and the mean number of femto access points in the network. It is shown that for a given system model, the algorithm converges quickly within thirty iterations, provided a feasible solution exists