Exploiting Device-to-Device Communications to Enhance Spatial Reuse for Popular Content Downloading in Directional mmWave Small Cells

With the explosive growth of mobile demand, small cells in millimeter wave (mmWave) bands underlying the macrocell networks have attracted intense interest from both academia and industry. MmWave communications in the 60 GHz band are able to utilize the huge unlicensed bandwidth to provide multiple Gbps transmission rates. In this case, device-to-device (D2D) communications in mmWave bands should be fully exploited due to no interference with the macrocell networks and higher achievable transmission rates. In addition, due to less interference by directional transmission, multiple links including D2D links can be scheduled for concurrent transmissions (spatial reuse). With the popularity of content-based mobile applications, popular content downloading in the small cells needs to be optimized to improve network performance and enhance user experience. In this paper, we develop an efficient scheduling scheme for popular content downloading in mmWave small cells, termed PCDS (popular content downloading scheduling), where both D2D communications in close proximity and concurrent transmissions are exploited to improve transmission efficiency. In PCDS, a transmission path selection algorithm is designed to establish multi-hop transmission paths for users, aiming at better utilization of D2D communications and concurrent transmissions. After transmission path selection, a concurrent transmission scheduling algorithm is designed to maximize the spatial reuse gain. Through extensive simulations under various traffic patterns, we demonstrate PCDS achieves near-optimal performance in terms of delay and throughput, and also superior performance compared with other existing protocols, especially under heavy load.Comment: 12 pages, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

Beam-searching and Transmission Scheduling in Millimeter Wave Communications

Millimeter wave (mmW) wireless networks are capable to support multi-gigabit data rates, by using directional communications with narrow beams. However, existing mmW communications standards are hindered by two problems: deafness and single link scheduling. The deafness problem, that is, a misalignment between transmitter and receiver beams, demands a time consuming beam-searching operation, which leads to an alignment-throughput tradeoff. Moreover, the existing mmW standards schedule a single link in each time slot and hence do not fully exploit the potential of mmW communications, where directional communications allow multiple concurrent transmissions. These two problems are addressed in this paper, where a joint beamwidth selection and power allocation problem is formulated by an optimization problem for short range mmW networks with the objective of maximizing effective network throughput. This optimization problem allows establishing the fundamental alignment-throughput tradeoff, however it is computationally complex and requires exact knowledge of network topology, which may not be available in practice. Therefore, two standard-compliant approximation solution algorithms are developed, which rely on underestimation and overestimation of interference. The first one exploits directionality to maximize the reuse of available spectrum and thereby increases the network throughput, while imposing almost no computational complexity. The second one is a more conservative approach that protects all active links from harmful interference, yet enhances the network throughput by 100% compared to the existing standards. Extensive performance analysis provides useful insights on the directionality level and the number of concurrent transmissions that should be pursued. Interestingly, extremely narrow beams are in general not optimal.Comment: 5 figures, 7 pages, accepted in ICC 201

V2X Meets NOMA: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks

Benefited from the widely deployed infrastructure, the LTE network has recently been considered as a promising candidate to support the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. However, with a massive number of devices accessing the V2X network in the future, the conventional OFDM-based LTE network faces the congestion issues due to its low efficiency of orthogonal access, resulting in significant access delay and posing a great challenge especially to safety-critical applications. The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique has been well recognized as an effective solution for the future 5G cellular networks to provide broadband communications and massive connectivity. In this article, we investigate the applicability of NOMA in supporting cellular V2X services to achieve low latency and high reliability. Starting with a basic V2X unicast system, a novel NOMA-based scheme is proposed to tackle the technical hurdles in designing high spectral efficient scheduling and resource allocation schemes in the ultra dense topology. We then extend it to a more general V2X broadcasting system. Other NOMA-based extended V2X applications and some open issues are also discussed.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin

An antenna switching based NOMA scheme for IEEE 802.15.4 concurrent transmission

This paper introduces a Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scheme to support concurrent transmission of multiple IEEE 802.15.4 packets. Unlike collision avoidance Multiple Access Control (MAC), concurrent transmission supports Concurrent-MAC (C-MAC) where packet collision is allowed. The communication latency can be reduced by C-MAC because a user can transmit immediately without waiting for the completion of other users’ transmission. The big challenge of concurrent transmission is that error free demodulation of multiple collided packets hardly can be achieved due to severe Multiple Access Interference (MAI). To improve the demodulation performance with MAI presented, we introduce an architecture with multiple switching antennas sharing a single analog transceiver to capture spatial character of different users. Successive Interference Cancellation (SIC) algorithm is designed to separate collided packets by utilizing the spatial character. Simulation shows that at least five users can transmit concurrently to the SIC receiver equipped with eight antennas without sacrificing Packet Error Rate

Machine Learning for Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) Networking

Fueled by the advancement of 5G new radio (5G NR), rapid development has occurred in many fields. Compared with the conventional approaches, beamforming and network slicing enable 5G NR to have ten times decrease in latency, connection density, and experienced throughput than 4G long term evolution (4G LTE). These advantages pave the way for the evolution of Cyber-physical Systems (CPS) on a large scale. The reduction of consumption, the advancement of control engineering, and the simplification of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) enable the UAS networking deployment on a large scale to become feasible. The UAS networking can finish multiple complex missions simultaneously. However, the limitations of the conventional approaches are still a big challenge to make a trade-off between the massive management and efficient networking on a large scale. With 5G NR and machine learning, in this dissertation, my contributions can be summarized as the following: I proposed a novel Optimized Ad-hoc On-demand Distance Vector (OAODV) routing protocol to improve the throughput of Intra UAS networking. The novel routing protocol can reduce the system overhead and be efficient. To improve the security, I proposed a blockchain scheme to mitigate the malicious basestations for cellular connected UAS networking and a proof-of-traffic (PoT) to improve the efficiency of blockchain for UAS networking on a large scale. Inspired by the biological cell paradigm, I proposed the cell wall routing protocols for heterogeneous UAS networking. With 5G NR, the inter connections between UAS networking can strengthen the throughput and elasticity of UAS networking. With machine learning, the routing schedulings for intra- and inter- UAS networking can enhance the throughput of UAS networking on a large scale. The inter UAS networking can achieve the max-min throughput globally edge coloring. I leveraged the upper and lower bound to accelerate the optimization of edge coloring. This dissertation paves a way regarding UAS networking in the integration of CPS and machine learning. The UAS networking can achieve outstanding performance in a decentralized architecture. Concurrently, this dissertation gives insights into UAS networking on a large scale. These are fundamental to integrating UAS and National Aerial System (NAS), critical to aviation in the operated and unmanned fields. The dissertation provides novel approaches for the promotion of UAS networking on a large scale. The proposed approaches extend the state-of-the-art of UAS networking in a decentralized architecture. All the alterations can contribute to the establishment of UAS networking with CPS

The History of the iPad

The purpose of this paper is to review the history of the iPad and its influence over contemporary computing. Although the iPad is relatively new, the tablet computer is having a long and lasting affect on how we communicate. With this essay, I attempt to review the technologies that emerged and converged to create the tablet computer. Of course, Apple and its iPad are at the center of this new computing movement