Towards reliable communication in LTE-A connected heterogeneous machine to machine network

Machine to machine (M2M) communication is an emerging technology that enables heterogeneous devices to communicate with each other without human intervention and thus forming so-called Internet of Things (IoTs). Wireless cellular networks (WCNs) play a significant role in the successful deployment of M2M communication. Specially the ongoing massive deployment of long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) makes it possible to establish machine type communication (MTC) in most urban and remote areas, and by using LTE-A backhaul network, a seamless network communication is being established between MTC-devices and-applications. However, the extensive network coverage does not ensure a successful implementation of M2M communication in the LTE-A, and therefore there are still some challenges. Energy efficient reliable transmission is perhaps the most compelling demand for various M2M applications. Among the factors affecting reliability of M2M communication are the high endto-end delay and high bit error rate. The objective of the thesis is to provide reliable M2M communication in LTE-A network. In this aim, to alleviate the signalling congestion on air interface and efficient data aggregation we consider a cluster based architecture where the MTC devices are grouped into number of clusters and traffics are forwarded through some special nodes called cluster heads (CHs) to the base station (BS) using single or multi-hop transmissions. In many deployment scenarios, some machines are allowed to move and change their location in the deployment area with very low mobility. In practice, the performance of data transmission often degrades with the increase of distance between neighboring CHs. CH needs to be reselected in such cases. However, frequent re-selection of CHs results in counter effect on routing and reconfiguration of resource allocation associated with CH-dependent protocols. In addition, the link quality between a CH-CH and CH-BS are very often affected by various dynamic environmental factors such as heat and humidity, obstacles and RF interferences. Since CH aggregates the traffic from all cluster members, failure of the CH means that the full cluster will fail. Many solutions have been proposed to combat with error prone wireless channel such as automatic repeat request (ARQ) and multipath routing. Though the above mentioned techniques improve the communication reliability but intervene the communication efficiency. In the former scheme, the transmitter retransmits the whole packet even though the part of the packet has been received correctly and in the later one, the receiver may receive the same information from multiple paths; thus both techniques are bandwidth and energy inefficient. In addition, with retransmission, overall end to end delay may exceed the maximum allowable delay budget. Based on the aforementioned observations, we identify CH-to-CH channel is one of the bottlenecks to provide reliable communication in cluster based multihop M2M network and present a full solution to support fountain coded cooperative communications. Our solution covers many aspects from relay selection to cooperative formation to meet the user’s QoS requirements. In the first part of the thesis, we first design a rateless-coded-incremental-relay selection (RCIRS) algorithm based on greedy techniques to guarantee the required data rate with a minimum cost. After that, we develop fountain coded cooperative communication protocols to facilitate the data transmission between two neighbor CHs. In the second part, we propose joint network and fountain coding schemes for reliable communication. Through coupling channel coding and network coding simultaneously in the physical layer, joint network and fountain coding schemes efficiently exploit the redundancy of both codes and effectively combat the detrimental effect of fading conditions in wireless channels. In the proposed scheme, after correctly decoding the information from different sources, a relay node applies network and fountain coding on the received signals and then transmits to the destination in a single transmission. Therefore, the proposed schemes exploit the diversity and coding gain to improve the system performance. In the third part, we focus on the reliable uplink transmission between CHs and BS where CHs transmit to BS directly or with the help of the LTE-A relay nodes (RN). We investigate both type-I and type-II enhanced LTE-A networks and propose a set of joint network and fountain coding schemes to enhance the link robustness. Finally, the proposed solutions are evaluated through extensive numerical simulations and the numerical results are presented to provide a comparison with the related works found in the literature

6G wireless communications networks: a comprehensive survey

The commercial fifth-generation (5G) wireless communications networks have already been deployed with the aim of providing high data rates. However, the rapid growth in the number of smart devices and the emergence of the Internet of Everything (IoE) applications, which require an ultra-reliable and low-latency communication, will result in a substantial burden on the 5G wireless networks. As such, the data rate that could be supplied by 5G networks will unlikely sustain the enormous ongoing data traffic explosion. This has motivated research into continuing to advance the existing wireless networks toward the future generation of cellular systems, known as sixth generation (6G). Therefore, it is essential to provide a prospective vision of the 6G and the key enabling technologies for realizing future networks. To this end, this paper presents a comprehensive review/survey of the future evolution of 6G networks. Specifically, the objective of the paper is to provide a comprehensive review/survey about the key enabling technologies for 6G networks, which include a discussion about the main operation principles of each technology, envisioned potential applications, current state-of-the-art research, and the related technical challenges. Overall, this paper provides useful information for industries and academic researchers and discusses the potentials for opening up new research directions

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate

Building the Future Internet through FIRE

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate