Performance evaluation of 5G millimeter-wave cellular access networks using a capacity-based network deployment tool

The next fifth generation (5G) of wireless communication networks comes with a set of new features to satisfy the demand of data-intensive applications: millimeter-wave frequencies, massive antenna arrays, beamforming, dense cells, and so forth. In this paper, we investigate the use of beamforming techniques through various architectures and evaluate the performance of 5G wireless access networks, using a capacity-based network deployment tool. This tool is proposed and applied to a realistic area in Ghent, Belgium, to simulate realistic 5G networks that respond to the instantaneous bit rate required by the active users. The results show that, with beamforming, 5G networks require almost 15% more base stations and 4 times less power to provide more capacity to the users and the same coverage performances, in comparison with the 4G reference network. Moreover, they are 3 times more energy efficient than the 4G network and the hybrid beamforming architecture appears to be a suitable architecture for beamforming to be considered when designing a 5G cellular network

Content Placement in Cache-Enabled Sub-6 GHz and Millimeter-Wave Multi-antenna Dense Small Cell Networks

This paper studies the performance of cache-enabled dense small cell networks consisting of multi-antenna sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave base stations. Different from the existing works which only consider a single antenna at each base station, the optimal content placement is unknown when the base stations have multiple antennas. We first derive the successful content delivery probability by accounting for the key channel features at sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. The maximization of the successful content delivery probability is a challenging problem. To tackle it, we first propose a constrained cross-entropy algorithm which achieves the near-optimal solution with moderate complexity. We then develop another simple yet effective heuristic probabilistic content placement scheme, termed two-stair algorithm, which strikes a balance between caching the most popular contents and achieving content diversity. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the constrained cross-entropy method and that the two-stair algorithm yields significantly better performance than only caching the most popular contents. The comparisons between the sub-6 GHz and mmWave systems reveal an interesting tradeoff between caching capacity and density for the mmWave system to achieve similar performance as the sub-6 GHz system.Comment: 14 pages; Accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

A New Look at Physical Layer Security, Caching, and Wireless Energy Harvesting for Heterogeneous Ultra-dense Networks

Heterogeneous ultra-dense networks enable ultra-high data rates and ultra-low latency through the use of dense sub-6 GHz and millimeter wave (mmWave) small cells with different antenna configurations. Existing work has widely studied spectral and energy efficiency in such networks and shown that high spectral and energy efficiency can be achieved. This article investigates the benefits of heterogeneous ultra-dense network architecture from the perspectives of three promising technologies, i.e., physical layer security, caching, and wireless energy harvesting, and provides enthusiastic outlook towards application of these technologies in heterogeneous ultra-dense networks. Based on the rationale of each technology, opportunities and challenges are identified to advance the research in this emerging network.Comment: Accepted to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

Secrecy Spectrum and Energy Efficiency Analysis in Massive MIMO-enabled Multi-Tier Hybrid HetNets

Massive multiple antenna systems in conjunction with millimeter (mmWave) communication have gained tremendous attention in the recent years owing to their high speed data delivery. However, security in these networks has been overlooked; thereby necessitating a comprehensive study. This paper analyzes the physical layer security performance of the downlink of a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO)-based hybrid heterogeneous network (HetNet) where both mmWave and sub-6 GHz small cells coexist. Specifically, a tractable approach using stochastic geometry is proposed to analyze the secrecy outage probability, secrecy energy efficiency (SEE) and secrecy spectrum efficiency (SSE) of the hybrid HetNets. Our study further characterizes the impact of large antenna arrays, directional beamforming gains, transmit power, and cell density on the above mentioned secrecy performance measures. The results show that at low transmit power operation, the secrecy performance enhances for higher small cell density. It has also been observed that the higher directivity gains at mmWave cells lead to a drop in secrecy performance of the network; thus a tradeoff exists between better coverage or secrecy

Wireless Powered Dense Cellular Networks: How Many Small Cells Do We Need?

This paper focuses on wireless powered 5G dense cellular networks, where base station (BS) delivers energy to user equipment (UE) via the microwave radiation in sub-6 GHz or millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency, and UE uses the harvested energy for uplink information transmission. By addressing the impacts of employing different number of antennas and bandwidths at lower and higher frequencies, we evaluate the amount of harvested energy and throughput in such networks. Based on the derived results, we obtain the required small cell density to achieve an expected level of harvested energy or throughput. Also, we obtain that when the ratio of the number of sub-6 GHz BSs to that of the mmWave BSs is lower than a given threshold, UE harvests more energy from a mmWave BS than a sub-6 GHz BS. We find how many mmWave small cells are needed to perform better than the sub-6 GHz small cells from the perspectives of harvested energy and throughput. Our results reveal that the amount of harvested energy from the mmWave tier can be comparable to the sub-6 GHz counterpart in the dense scenarios. For the same tier scale, mmWave tier can achieve higher throughput. Furthermore, the throughput gap between different mmWave frequencies increases with the mmWave BS density.Comment: pages 1-14, accepted by IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication