Energy Efficiency and Sum Rate Tradeoffs for Massive MIMO Systems with Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications

In this paper, we investigate the coexistence of two technologies that have been put forward for the fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, namely, network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications and massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output). Potential benefits of both technologies are known individually, but the tradeoffs resulting from their coexistence have not been adequately addressed. To this end, we assume that D2D users reuse the downlink resources of cellular networks in an underlay fashion. In addition, multiple antennas at the BS are used in order to obtain precoding gains and simultaneously support multiple cellular users using multiuser or massive MIMO technique. Two metrics are considered, namely the average sum rate (ASR) and energy efficiency (EE). We derive tractable and directly computable expressions and study the tradeoffs between the ASR and EE as functions of the number of BS antennas, the number of cellular users and the density of D2D users within a given coverage area. Our results show that both the ASR and EE behave differently in scenarios with low and high density of D2D users, and that coexistence of underlay D2D communications and massive MIMO is mainly beneficial in low densities of D2D users.Comment: 30 pages, 10 figures, Submitte

Mode selection for energy efficient D2D communications in dynamic TDD systems

Network-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communicationis a promising technology for improving the performanceof proximity-based services. This paper demonstrates how D2Dcommunication can be used to improve the energy-efficiencyof cellular networks, leading to a greener system operationand a prolonged battery life of the mobile devices. Assuminga flexible TDD system, we develop optimal mode selectionpolicies for minimizing the energy cost (either from the systemor from the device perspective) while guaranteeing a certainrate requirement. The jointly optimal transmit power and timeallocation, as well as the optimal mode selection, is found bysolving a small convex optimization problem. Special attentionis given to the geometrical interpretation of the obtained results.We show that when network energy is the primary concern, D2Dmode is preferable in a large portion of the cell. When the deviceenergy consumption is most important, on the other hand, thearea where D2D mode is preferable shrinks and becomes close tocircular. Finally, we investigate how network parameters affectthe range where direct communication is preferred.QC 20150911</p

Closed-form optimality characterization of network-assisted device-to-device communications

International audience—This paper considers the mode selection problem for network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications with multiple antennas at the base station. We study transmission in both dedicated and shared frequency bands. Given the type of resources (i.e., dedicated or shared), the user equipment (UE) decides to transmit in the conventional cellular mode or directly to its corresponding receiver in the D2D mode. We formulate this problem under two different objectives. The first problem is to maximize the quality-of-service (QoS) given a transmit power, and the second problem is to minimize the transmit power given a QoS requirement. We derive closed-form results for the optimal decision and show that the two problem formulations behave differently. Taking a geometrical approach, we study the area around the transmitter UE where the receiving UE should be to have D2D mode optimality, and how it is affected by the transmit power, QoS, and the number of base station antennas. I. INTRODUCTION Emerging multimedia services and applications introduce new traffic types and user behaviors [1]. To address the higher demands imposed on wireless networks, more spectrally effi-cient and energy efficient approaches should be developed. Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks is proposed to improve cell spectral and energy efficiency of the network [2], [3]. In D2D transmission mode, user equipments (UEs) communicate directly to their intended receivers as opposed to the conventional cellular mode where they communicate through the base station (BS). D2D mode can bring proximity gains and reduce the transmission time. Users in the D2D mode can transmit either in a separate frequency band or via spectrum sharing with cellular users. In the former case, D2D communications do not interfere with cellular users. This case is interesting due to its potential applications, such as public safety and multicasting for local multimedia services and robustness to infrastructure failure. On the other hand, spectrum sharing can be employed to efficiently utilize the resources which allows for better area spectral efficiency [4]. The gain from spectrum sharing can be assured if the interference is controlled by proper mode selection and resource management. However, depending on the network topology and channel conditions, it may not always be beneficial to choose the D2D mode for a UE

Closed-form optimality characterization of network-assisted device-to-device communications

International audience—This paper considers the mode selection problem for network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications with multiple antennas at the base station. We study transmission in both dedicated and shared frequency bands. Given the type of resources (i.e., dedicated or shared), the user equipment (UE) decides to transmit in the conventional cellular mode or directly to its corresponding receiver in the D2D mode. We formulate this problem under two different objectives. The first problem is to maximize the quality-of-service (QoS) given a transmit power, and the second problem is to minimize the transmit power given a QoS requirement. We derive closed-form results for the optimal decision and show that the two problem formulations behave differently. Taking a geometrical approach, we study the area around the transmitter UE where the receiving UE should be to have D2D mode optimality, and how it is affected by the transmit power, QoS, and the number of base station antennas. I. INTRODUCTION Emerging multimedia services and applications introduce new traffic types and user behaviors [1]. To address the higher demands imposed on wireless networks, more spectrally effi-cient and energy efficient approaches should be developed. Device-to-device (D2D) communication underlaying cellular networks is proposed to improve cell spectral and energy efficiency of the network [2], [3]. In D2D transmission mode, user equipments (UEs) communicate directly to their intended receivers as opposed to the conventional cellular mode where they communicate through the base station (BS). D2D mode can bring proximity gains and reduce the transmission time. Users in the D2D mode can transmit either in a separate frequency band or via spectrum sharing with cellular users. In the former case, D2D communications do not interfere with cellular users. This case is interesting due to its potential applications, such as public safety and multicasting for local multimedia services and robustness to infrastructure failure. On the other hand, spectrum sharing can be employed to efficiently utilize the resources which allows for better area spectral efficiency [4]. The gain from spectrum sharing can be assured if the interference is controlled by proper mode selection and resource management. However, depending on the network topology and channel conditions, it may not always be beneficial to choose the D2D mode for a UE

Closed-Form Optimality Characterization of Network-Assisted Device-to-Device Communications

This paper considers the mode selection problem for network-assisted device-to-device (D2D) communications with multiple antennas at base station. We study transmission in both dedicated and shared frequency bands. Given the type of resources (i.e., dedicated or shared), the user equipment (UE) decides to transmit in the conventional cellular mode or directly to its corresponding receiver in D2D mode. We formulate this problem under two different objectives. The first problem is to maximize the quality-of-service (QoS) given a transmit power, and the second problem is to minimize the transmit power given a QoS requirement. We derive closed-form results for the optimal decision and show that the two problem formulations behave differently. Taking a geometrical approach, we study the area around the transmitter UE where the receiving UE should be to have D2D mode optimality, and how it is affected by the transmit power, QoS, and the number of base station antennas.QC 20140509</p

Resource Management in Next Generation Cellular Networks

Fifth generation of cellular networks brings new challenges to the network operators as new applications create new demands. In this thesis, we will study different topics on cellular networks, explain the challenges of each topic, and propose solutions to tackle these challenges. The topics we consider are: i) uplink scheduling in multi-cell OFDMA networks, ii) downlink scheduling in multi-cell OFDMA networks, iii) full-duplex communications in cellular networks, and iv) cellular networks with intra-cellular traffic. We begin our study with uplink scheduling in 5G networks as its importance has increased in recent years and the related literature is relatively scarce. Scheduling on the uplink is a challenging task mostly due to power and interference management. In practical scenarios, each cell schedules its own users independently from the other cells. In this case, the interference that is received from the neighboring cells cannot be known since the schedules of the other cells are not known. Therefore, interference has to be estimated in order to estimate the rate of each user. When this estimation is not done properly, it can cause resource losses or under-utilization as we show in this thesis. To avoid this problem, all the cells could be scheduled simultaneously using a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) and hence we can take the exact interference into account while scheduling. Formulating the optimal multi-cell scheduler is straightforward, but it is a very large integer problem that cannot be solved easily and fast. We transform it into a more tractable upper bounding problem and solve it with an iterative algorithm. However, it is still not fast enough to be used in real time. Hence, we focus on improving the existing uplink schedulers by proposing practical solutions for the case when there is no C-RAN and for the case when a C-RAN is present. We also propose a soft frequency reuse (SFR) based scheduler that performs much better than the existing schedulers. We then perform a similar study for downlink scheduling that carries the majority of the cellular traffic today. While downlink scheduling is easier than the uplink due to simpler interference management, it is still not trivial to achieve performance comparable to the maximum achievable performance using a practical scheduler. The main contribution of this study is to show that a well-tuned SFR-based local scheduler can perform almost as well as the centralized scheduler and hence a centralized scheme for downlink might not be necessary. We next consider a cellular network where full-duplex communications (FDC) are enabled at the base stations. The coexistence of uplink and downlink transmissions in co-channel cells create new sources of interference that have to be taken into account when studying the performance of FDC. When doing so, traffic asymmetry (TA), i.e., the fact that the traffic is in general much larger on the downlink than on the uplink, should also be considered. We will show that ignoring TA biases the results in favor of FDC. We compute the performance gain that an FDC-enabled multi-cell OFDMA network has over a regular time division duplex (TDD) system considering all sources of interference and TA by formulating a multi-cell centralized scheduling problem. We use it to analyze the impact of each new source of interference as well as of TA. Our conclusion is that, FDC does not improve performance enough in a multi-cell system to warrant its added complexity in an urban setting when TA and the interference have realistic values. The verdict is slightly better in a rural setting. Furthermore, we show that heterogeneous networks can be a better choice than the homogeneous networks to deploy FDC when it is adjusted well. We finalize our study with device-to-device (D2D) communications. With the advent of smart phones, there are many new applications that create local (intra-cellular) traffic among the users in the same network. Most work in the literature focuses on the possibility to utilize a direct link between those users to by-pass the base station. Such transmissions are called D2D mode. However, implementing D2D is not easy due to difficult interference management and not knowing the required channel gains. We face a major problem while studying D2D. We need a clear benchmark to evaluate the performance of D2D mode. To this end, we focus on designing a type-aware scheduler (a scheduler that has the information on the type of traffic, which can be downlink, uplink, or intra-cellular) in a case where direct communication between users is not enabled. This scheduler can be seen as the benchmark against D2D mode. We show that performance gain can be obtained by jointly scheduling the uplink and downlink with respect to the case where the scheduler is blind to the types. We show for a homogeneous network that when the traffic types are known to a scheduler, a significant performance gain can be achieved compared to the case where the traffic types are not known. We also analyze heterogeneous networks that consist of macro cells and small cells and show that large performance gain can be obtained by performing type-aware user association jointly with user scheduling. The main contributions of the thesis are i) to analyze the performance of existing schedulers and see if they perform well enough compared to the maximum achievable performance both on the uplink and the downlink, ii) to propose enhancements or new schedulers when the existing schedulers do not perform well enough, iii) to illustrate when FDC deployment can be useful under which scenarios, and iv) to show the importance of information of traffic types when users with different types of traffic exist