Cognition-inspired 5G cellular networks: a review and the road ahead

Despite the evolution of cellular networks, spectrum scarcity and the lack of intelligent and autonomous capabilities remain a cause for concern. These problems have resulted in low network capacity, high signaling overhead, inefficient data forwarding, and low scalability, which are expected to persist as the stumbling blocks to deploy, support and scale next-generation applications, including smart city and virtual reality. Fifth-generation (5G) cellular networking, along with its salient operational characteristics - including the cognitive and cooperative capabilities, network virtualization, and traffic offload - can address these limitations to cater to future scenarios characterized by highly heterogeneous, ultra-dense, and highly variable environments. Cognitive radio (CR) and cognition cycle (CC) are key enabling technologies for 5G. CR enables nodes to explore and use underutilized licensed channels; while CC has been embedded in CR nodes to learn new knowledge and adapt to network dynamics. CR and CC have brought advantages to a cognition-inspired 5G cellular network, including addressing the spectrum scarcity problem, promoting interoperation among heterogeneous entities, and providing intelligence and autonomous capabilities to support 5G core operations, such as smart beamforming. In this paper, we present the attributes of 5G and existing state of the art focusing on how CR and CC have been adopted in 5G to provide spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, improved quality of service and experience, and cost efficiency. This main contribution of this paper is to complement recent work by focusing on the networking aspect of CR and CC applied to 5G due to the urgent need to investigate, as well as to further enhance, CR and CC as core mechanisms to support 5G. This paper is aspired to establish a foundation and to spark new research interest in this topic. Open research opportunities and platform implementation are also presented to stimulate new research initiatives in this exciting area

D13.1 Fundamental issues on energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking

Deliverable D13.1 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the current status in the research area of energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking and highlights the fundamental issues still open for further investigation. Furthermore, the report presents the Joint Research Activities (JRAs) which will be performed within WP1.3. For each activity there is the description, the identification of the adherence with the identified fundamental open issues, a presentation of the initial results, and a roadmap for the planned joint research work in each topic.Preprin

Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

The Internet of Things (IoT) has attracted much attention from society, industry and academia as a promising technology that can enhance day to day activities, and the creation of new business models, products and services, and serve as a broad source of research topics and ideas. A future digital society is envisioned, composed of numerous wireless connected sensors and devices. Driven by huge demand, the massive IoT (mIoT) or massive machine type communication (mMTC) has been identified as one of the three main communication scenarios for 5G. In addition to connectivity, computing and storage and data management are also long-standing issues for low-cost devices and sensors. The book is a collection of outstanding technical research and industrial papers covering new research results, with a wide range of features within the 5G-and-beyond framework. It provides a range of discussions of the major research challenges and achievements within this topic

Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications that was published in Sensors

Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue Internet of Things and Sensors Networks in 5G Wireless Communications that was published in Sensors

Game Theory for Multi-Access Edge Computing:Survey, Use Cases, and Future Trends

Game theory (GT) has been used with significant success to formulate, and either design or optimize, the operation of many representative communications and networking scenarios. The games in these scenarios involve, as usual, diverse players with conflicting goals. This paper primarily surveys the literature that has applied theoretical games to wireless networks, emphasizing use cases of upcoming multiaccess edge computing (MEC). MEC is relatively new and offers cloud services at the network periphery, aiming to reduce service latency backhaul load, and enhance relevant operational aspects such as quality of experience or security. Our presentation of GT is focused on the major challenges imposed by MEC services over the wireless resources. The survey is divided into classical and evolutionary games. Then, our discussion proceeds to more specific aspects which have a considerable impact on the game's usefulness, namely, rational versus evolving strategies, cooperation among players, available game information, the way the game is played (single turn, repeated), the game's model evaluation, and how the model results can be applied for both optimizing resource-constrained resources and balancing diverse tradeoffs in real edge networking scenarios. Finally, we reflect on lessons learned, highlighting future trends and research directions for applying theoretical model games in upcoming MEC services, considering both network design issues and usage scenarios

On-demand offloading collaboration framework based on LTE network virtualisation

Recently, there has been a significant increase in data traffic on mobile networks, due to the growth in the numbers of users and the average data volume per user. In a context of traffic surge and reduced revenues, operators face the challenge of finding costless solutions to increase capacity and coverage. Such a solution should necessarily rule out any physical expansion, and mainly conceive real-time strategies to utilise the spectrum more efficiently, such as network offload and Long-term Evolution (LTE) network virtualisation. Virtualisation is playing a significant role in shaping the way of networking now and in future, since it is being devised as one of the available technologies heading towards the upcoming 5G mobile broadband. Now, the successful utilisation of such innovative techniques relies critically on an efficient call admission control (CAC) algorithm. In this work, framework is proposed to manage the operation of a system in which CAC, virtualisation and Local break out (LBO) strategies are collaboratively implemented to avoid congestion in a mobile network, while simultaneously guaranteeing that measures of quality of service (QoS) are kept above desired thresholds. In order to evaluate the proposed framework, two simulation stages were carried out. In the first stage, MATLAB was used to run a numerical example, with the purpose of verifying the mathematical model of the proposed framework in air interface level. The second stage involved of using open source applications such as, Emulated Virtual Environment (EVE) and Wireshark, for emulating the traffic in the network for different scenarios inside the core network. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed framework

AN EFFICIENT INTERFERENCE AVOIDANCE SCHEME FOR DEVICE-TODEVICE ENABLED FIFTH GENERATION NARROWBAND INTERNET OF THINGS NETWOKS’

Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a low-power wide-area (LPWA) technology built on long-term evolution (LTE) functionalities and standardized by the 3rd-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). Due to its support for massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and different IoT use cases with rigorous standards in terms of connection, energy efficiency, reachability, reliability, and latency, NB-IoT has attracted the research community. However, as the capacity needs for various IoT use cases expand, the LTE evolved packet core (EPC) system's numerous functionalities may become overburdened and suboptimal. Several research efforts are currently in progress to address these challenges. As a result, an overview of these efforts with a specific focus on the optimized architecture of the LTE EPC functionalities, the 5G architectural design for NB-IoT integration, the enabling technologies necessary for 5G NB-IoT, 5G new radio (NR) coexistence with NB-IoT, and feasible architectural deployment schemes of NB-IoT with cellular networks is discussed. This thesis also presents cloud-assisted relay with backscatter communication as part of a detailed study of the technical performance attributes and channel communication characteristics from the physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layers of the NB-IoT, with a focus on 5G. The numerous drawbacks that come with simulating these systems are explored. The enabling market for NB-IoT, the benefits for a few use cases, and the potential critical challenges associated with their deployment are all highlighted. Fortunately, the cyclic prefix orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CPOFDM) based waveform by 3GPP NR for improved mobile broadband (eMBB) services does not prohibit the use of other waveforms in other services, such as the NB-IoT service for mMTC. As a result, the coexistence of 5G NR and NB-IoT must be manageably orthogonal (or quasi-orthogonal) to minimize mutual interference that limits the form of freedom in the waveform's overall design. As a result, 5G coexistence with NB-IoT will introduce a new interference challenge, distinct from that of the legacy network, even though the NR's coexistence with NB-IoT is believed to improve network capacity and expand the coverage of the user data rate, as well as improves robust communication through frequency reuse. Interference challenges may make channel estimation difficult for NB-IoT devices, limiting the user performance and spectral efficiency. Various existing interference mitigation solutions either add to the network's overhead, computational complexity and delay or are hampered by low data rate and coverage. These algorithms are unsuitable for an NB-IoT network owing to the low-complexity nature. As a result, a D2D communication based interference-control technique becomes an effective strategy for addressing this problem. This thesis used D2D communication to decrease the network bottleneck in dense 5G NBIoT networks prone to interference. For D2D-enabled 5G NB-IoT systems, the thesis presents an interference-avoidance resource allocation that considers the less favourable cell edge NUEs. To simplify the algorithm's computing complexity and reduce interference power, the system divides the optimization problem into three sub-problems. First, in an orthogonal deployment technique using channel state information (CSI), the channel gain factor is leveraged by selecting a probable reuse channel with higher QoS control. Second, a bisection search approach is used to find the best power control that maximizes the network sum rate, and third, the Hungarian algorithm is used to build a maximum bipartite matching strategy to choose the optimal pairing pattern between the sets of NUEs and the D2D pairs. The proposed approach improves the D2D sum rate and overall network SINR of the 5G NB-IoT system, according to the numerical data. The maximum power constraint of the D2D pair, D2D's location, Pico-base station (PBS) cell radius, number of potential reuse channels, and cluster distance impact the D2D pair's performance. The simulation results achieve 28.35%, 31.33%, and 39% SINR performance higher than the ARSAD, DCORA, and RRA algorithms when the number of NUEs is twice the number of D2D pairs, and 2.52%, 14.80%, and 39.89% SINR performance higher than the ARSAD, RRA, and DCORA when the number of NUEs and D2D pairs are equal. As a result, a D2D sum rate increase of 9.23%, 11.26%, and 13.92% higher than the ARSAD, DCORA, and RRA when the NUE’s number is twice the number of D2D pairs, and a D2D’s sum rate increase of 1.18%, 4.64% and 15.93% higher than the ARSAD, RRA and DCORA respectively, with an equal number of NUEs and D2D pairs is achieved. The results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed scheme. The thesis also addressed the problem where the cell-edge NUE's QoS is critical to challenges such as long-distance transmission, delays, low bandwidth utilization, and high system overhead that affect 5G NB-IoT network performance. In this case, most cell-edge NUEs boost their transmit power to maximize network throughput. Integrating cooperating D2D relaying technique into 5G NB-IoT heterogeneous network (HetNet) uplink spectrum sharing increases the system's spectral efficiency and interference power, further degrading the network. Using a max-max SINR (Max-SINR) approach, this thesis proposed an interference-aware D2D relaying strategy for 5G NB-IoT QoS improvement for a cell-edge NUE to achieve optimum system performance. The Lagrangian-dual technique is used to optimize the transmit power of the cell-edge NUE to the relay based on the average interference power constraint, while the relay to the NB-IoT base station (NBS) employs a fixed transmit power. To choose an optimal D2D relay node, the channel-to-interference plus noise ratio (CINR) of all available D2D relays is used to maximize the minimum cell-edge NUE's data rate while ensuring the cellular NUEs' QoS requirements are satisfied. Best harmonic mean, best-worst, half-duplex relay selection, and a D2D communication scheme were among the other relaying selection strategies studied. The simulation results reveal that the Max-SINR selection scheme outperforms all other selection schemes due to the high channel gain between the two communication devices except for the D2D communication scheme. The proposed algorithm achieves 21.27% SINR performance, which is nearly identical to the half-duplex scheme, but outperforms the best-worst and harmonic selection techniques by 81.27% and 40.29%, respectively. As a result, as the number of D2D relays increases, the capacity increases by 14.10% and 47.19%, respectively, over harmonic and half-duplex techniques. Finally, the thesis presents future research works on interference control in addition with the open research directions on PHY and MAC properties and a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis presented in Chapter 2 to encourage further study on 5G NB-IoT