A Novel Beamformed Control Channel Design for LTE with Full Dimension-MIMO

The Full Dimension-MIMO (FD-MIMO) technology is capable of achieving huge improvements in network throughput with simultaneous connectivity of a large number of mobile wireless devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In FD-MIMO, with a large number of antennae at the base station and the ability to perform beamforming, the capacity of the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) has increased a lot. However, the current specifications of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not allow the base station to perform beamforming techniques for the physical downlink control channel (PDCCH), and hence, PDCCH has neither the capacity nor the coverage of PDSCH. Therefore, PDCCH capacity will still limit the performance of a network as it dictates the number of users that can be scheduled at a given time instant. In Release 11, 3GPP introduced enhanced PDCCH (EPDCCH) to increase the PDCCH capacity at the cost of sacrificing the PDSCH resources. The problem of enhancing the PDCCH capacity within the available control channel resources has not been addressed yet in the literature. Hence, in this paper, we propose a novel beamformed PDCCH (BF-PDCCH) design which is aligned to the 3GPP specifications and requires simple software changes at the base station. We rely on the sounding reference signals transmitted in the uplink to decide the best beam for a user and ingeniously schedule the users in PDCCH. We perform system level simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed design and show that the proposed BF-PDCCH achieves larger network throughput when compared with the current state of art algorithms, PDCCH and EPDCCH schemes

Advanced Radio Resource Management for Multi Antenna Packet Radio Systems

In this paper, we propose fairness-oriented packet scheduling (PS) schemes with power-efficient control mechanism for future packet radio systems. In general, the radio resource management functionality plays an important role in new OFDMA based networks. The control of the network resource division among the users is performed by packet scheduling functionality based on maximizing cell coverage and capacity satisfying, and certain quality of service requirements. Moreover, multiantenna transmit-receive schemes provide additional flexibility to packet scheduler functionality. In order to mitigate inter-cell and co-channel interference problems in OFDMA cellular networks soft frequency reuse with different power masks patterns is used. Stemming from the earlier enhanced proportional fair scheduler studies for single-input multiple-output (SIMO) and multiple-input multipleoutput (MIMO) systems, we extend the development of efficient packet scheduling algorithms by adding transmit power considerations in the overall priority metrics calculations and scheduling decisions. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed scheduling schemes by simulating practical orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) based packet radio system in terms of throughput, coverage and fairness distribution among users. As a concrete example, under reduced overall transmit power constraint and unequal power distribution for different sub-bands, we demonstrate that by using the proposed power-aware multi-user scheduling schemes, significant coverage and fairness improvements in the order of 70% and 20%, respectively, can be obtained, at the expense of average throughput loss of only 15%.Comment: 14 Pages, IJWM

LTE-Advanced radio access enhancements: A survey

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) is the next step in LTE evolution and allows operators to improve network performance and service capabilities through smooth deployment of new techniques and technologies. LTE-Advanced uses some new features on top of the existing LTE standards to provide better user experience and higher throughputs. Some of the most significant features introduced in LTE-Advanced are carrier aggregation, enhancements in heterogeneous networks, coordinated multipoint transmission and reception, enhanced multiple input multiple output usage and deployment of relay nodes in the radio network. Mentioned features are mainly aimed to enhance the radio access part of the cellular networks. This survey article presents an overview of the key radio access features and functionalities of the LTE-Advanced radio access network, supported by the simulation results. We also provide a detailed review of the literature together with a very rich list of the references for each of the features. An LTE-Advanced roadmap and the latest updates and trends in LTE markets are also presented

Two-Layered Superposition of Broadcast/Multicast and Unicast Signals in Multiuser OFDMA Systems

We study optimal delivery strategies of one common and $K$ independent messages from a source to multiple users in wireless environments. In particular, two-layered superposition of broadcast/multicast and unicast signals is considered in a downlink multiuser OFDMA system. In the literature and industry, the two-layer superposition is often considered as a pragmatic approach to make a compromise between the simple but suboptimal orthogonal multiplexing (OM) and the optimal but complex fully-layered non-orthogonal multiplexing. In this work, we show that only two-layers are necessary to achieve the maximum sum-rate when the common message has higher priority than the $K$ individual unicast messages, and OM cannot be sum-rate optimal in general. We develop an algorithm that finds the optimal power allocation over the two-layers and across the OFDMA radio resources in static channels and a class of fading channels. Two main use-cases are considered: i) Multicast and unicast multiplexing when $K$ users with uplink capabilities request both common and independent messages, and ii) broadcast and unicast multiplexing when the common message targets receive-only devices and $K$ users with uplink capabilities additionally request independent messages. Finally, we develop a transceiver design for broadcast/multicast and unicast superposition transmission based on LTE-A-Pro physical layer and show with numerical evaluations in mobile environments with multipath propagation that the capacity improvements can be translated into significant practical performance gains compared to the orthogonal schemes in the 3GPP specifications. We also analyze the impact of real channel estimation and show that significant gains in terms of spectral efficiency or coverage area are still available even with estimation errors and imperfect interference cancellation for the two-layered superposition system

Energy efficiency and interference management in long term evolution-advanced networks.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Cellular networks are continuously undergoing fast extraordinary evolution to overcome technological challenges. The fourth generation (4G) or Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) networks offer improvements in performance through increase in network density, while allowing self-organisation and self-healing. The LTE-Advanced architecture is heterogeneous, consisting of different radio access technologies (RATs), such as macrocell, smallcells, cooperative relay nodes (RNs), having various capabilities, and coexisting in the same geographical coverage area. These network improvements come with different challenges that affect users’ quality of service (QoS) and network performance. These challenges include; interference management, high energy consumption and poor coverage of marginal users. Hence, developing mitigation schemes for these identified challenges is the focus of this thesis. The exponential growth of mobile broadband data usage and poor networks’ performance along the cell edges, result in a large increase of the energy consumption for both base stations (BSs) and users. This due to improper RN placement or deployment that creates severe inter-cell and intracell interferences in the networks. It is therefore, necessary to investigate appropriate RN placement techniques which offer efficient coverage extension while reducing energy consumption and mitigating interference in LTE-Advanced femtocell networks. This work proposes energy efficient and optimal RN placement (EEORNP) algorithm based on greedy algorithm to assure improved and effective coverage extension. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated in terms of coverage percentage and number of RN needed to cover marginalised users and found to outperform other RN placement schemes. Transceiver design has gained importance as one of the effective tools of interference management. Centralised transceiver design techniques have been used to improve network performance for LTE-Advanced networks in terms of mean square error (MSE), bit error rate (BER) and sum-rate. The centralised transceiver design techniques are not effective and computationally feasible for distributed cooperative heterogeneous networks, the systems considered in this thesis. This work proposes decentralised transceivers design based on the least-square (LS) and minimum MSE (MMSE) pilot-aided channel estimations for interference management in uplink LTE-Advanced femtocell networks. The decentralised transceiver algorithms are designed for the femtocells, the macrocell user equipments (MUEs), RNs and the cell edge macrocell UEs (CUEs) in the half-duplex cooperative relaying systems. The BER performances of the proposed algorithms with the effect of channel estimation are investigated. Finally, the EE optimisation is investigated in half-duplex multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) relay systems. The EE optimisation is divided into sub-optimal EE problems due to the distributed architecture of the MU-MIMO relay systems. The decentralised approach is employed to design the transceivers such as MUEs, CUEs, RN and femtocells for the different sub-optimal EE problems. The EE objective functions are formulated as convex optimisation problems subject to the QoS and transmit powers constraints in case of perfect channel state information (CSI). The non-convexity of the formulated EE optimisation problems is surmounted by introducing the EE parameter substractive function into each proposed algorithms. These EE parameters are updated using the Dinkelbach’s algorithm. The EE optimisation of the proposed algorithms is achieved after finding the optimal transceivers where the unknown interference terms in the transmit signals are designed with the zero-forcing (ZF) assumption and estimation errors are added to improve the EE performances. With the aid of simulation results, the performance of the proposed decentralised schemes are derived in terms of average EE evaluation and found to be better than existing algorithms