Energy efficiency and interference management in long term evolution-advanced networks.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Cellular networks are continuously undergoing fast extraordinary evolution to overcome technological challenges. The fourth generation (4G) or Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) networks offer improvements in performance through increase in network density, while allowing self-organisation and self-healing. The LTE-Advanced architecture is heterogeneous, consisting of different radio access technologies (RATs), such as macrocell, smallcells, cooperative relay nodes (RNs), having various capabilities, and coexisting in the same geographical coverage area. These network improvements come with different challenges that affect users’ quality of service (QoS) and network performance. These challenges include; interference management, high energy consumption and poor coverage of marginal users. Hence, developing mitigation schemes for these identified challenges is the focus of this thesis. The exponential growth of mobile broadband data usage and poor networks’ performance along the cell edges, result in a large increase of the energy consumption for both base stations (BSs) and users. This due to improper RN placement or deployment that creates severe inter-cell and intracell interferences in the networks. It is therefore, necessary to investigate appropriate RN placement techniques which offer efficient coverage extension while reducing energy consumption and mitigating interference in LTE-Advanced femtocell networks. This work proposes energy efficient and optimal RN placement (EEORNP) algorithm based on greedy algorithm to assure improved and effective coverage extension. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated in terms of coverage percentage and number of RN needed to cover marginalised users and found to outperform other RN placement schemes. Transceiver design has gained importance as one of the effective tools of interference management. Centralised transceiver design techniques have been used to improve network performance for LTE-Advanced networks in terms of mean square error (MSE), bit error rate (BER) and sum-rate. The centralised transceiver design techniques are not effective and computationally feasible for distributed cooperative heterogeneous networks, the systems considered in this thesis. This work proposes decentralised transceivers design based on the least-square (LS) and minimum MSE (MMSE) pilot-aided channel estimations for interference management in uplink LTE-Advanced femtocell networks. The decentralised transceiver algorithms are designed for the femtocells, the macrocell user equipments (MUEs), RNs and the cell edge macrocell UEs (CUEs) in the half-duplex cooperative relaying systems. The BER performances of the proposed algorithms with the effect of channel estimation are investigated. Finally, the EE optimisation is investigated in half-duplex multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) relay systems. The EE optimisation is divided into sub-optimal EE problems due to the distributed architecture of the MU-MIMO relay systems. The decentralised approach is employed to design the transceivers such as MUEs, CUEs, RN and femtocells for the different sub-optimal EE problems. The EE objective functions are formulated as convex optimisation problems subject to the QoS and transmit powers constraints in case of perfect channel state information (CSI). The non-convexity of the formulated EE optimisation problems is surmounted by introducing the EE parameter substractive function into each proposed algorithms. These EE parameters are updated using the Dinkelbach’s algorithm. The EE optimisation of the proposed algorithms is achieved after finding the optimal transceivers where the unknown interference terms in the transmit signals are designed with the zero-forcing (ZF) assumption and estimation errors are added to improve the EE performances. With the aid of simulation results, the performance of the proposed decentralised schemes are derived in terms of average EE evaluation and found to be better than existing algorithms

Recent Advances in Wireless Communications and Networks

This book focuses on the current hottest issues from the lowest layers to the upper layers of wireless communication networks and provides "real-time" research progress on these issues. The authors have made every effort to systematically organize the information on these topics to make it easily accessible to readers of any level. This book also maintains the balance between current research results and their theoretical support. In this book, a variety of novel techniques in wireless communications and networks are investigated. The authors attempt to present these topics in detail. Insightful and reader-friendly descriptions are presented to nourish readers of any level, from practicing and knowledgeable communication engineers to beginning or professional researchers. All interested readers can easily find noteworthy materials in much greater detail than in previous publications and in the references cited in these chapters

A Comprehensive Study of Multiple Access Techniques in 6G Networks

With the proliferation of numerous burgeoning services such as ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), massive machine type communications (mMTC), enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), among others, wireless communication systems are expected to face daunting challenges. In order to satisfy these ever-increasing traffic demands, diverse quality-of-services (QoS) requirements, and the massive connectivity accompanied by these new applications, various innovative and promising technologies, and architectures need to be developed. Novel multiple-access techniques are currently being explored in both academia and industry in order to accommodate such unprecedented requirements. Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been deemed as one of the vital enabling multiple access techniques for the upcoming six-generation (6G) networks. This is due to its ability to enhance network spectral efficiency (NSE) and support a massive number of connected devices. Owing to its potential benefits, NOMA is recognized as a prominent member of next-generation multiple access (NGMA). Several emerging techniques such as full-duplex (FD) communication, device-to-device (D2D) communications, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), coordinated multipoint (CoMP), cloud radio access networks, are being gradually developed to address fundamental problems in future wireless networks. In this thesis, and with the goal of converging toward NGMA, we investigate the synergistic integration between NOMA and other evolving physical layer technologies. Specifically, we analyze this integration aiming at improving the performance of cell-edge users (CEUs), mitigating the detrimental effect of inter-cell interference (ICI), designing energy-efficient multiple access toward ``green’’ wireless networks, guarantying reliable communication between NOMA UEs and base stations (BSs)/remote radio heads (RRHs), and maintaining the required QoS in terms of the minimum achievable data rate, especially at CEUs. Regarding the ICI mitigation in multi-cell NOMA networks and tackling the connectivity issue in traditional CoMP-based OMA networks, we first investigate the integration between location-aware CoMP transmission and NOMA in downlink heterogeneous C-RAN. In doing so, we design a novel analytical framework using tools from stochastic geometry to analyze the system performance in terms of the average achievable data rate per NOMA UE. Our results reveal that CoMP NOMA can provide a significant gain in terms of network spectral efficiency compared to the traditional CoMP OMA scheme. In addition, with the goal of further improving the performance of CEUs and user fairness, cooperative transmission with the aid of D2D communication and FD or half-duplex (HD) transmission, has been introduced to NOMA, which is commonly known as cooperative NOMA (C-NOMA). As a result, we extend our study to also investigate the potential gains of investigating CoMP and C-NOMA. In such a framework, we exploit the cooperation between the RRHs/BSs and the successive decoding strategy at NOMA UEs that are near the RRHs/BSs. Specifically, we investigate both performance analysis and resource management optimization (power control and user pairing). Our results show that the transmit power at the BS, the transmit power at the relay user, and the self-interference (SI) value at the relay user determine which multiple access technique, CoMP NOMA, CoMP HD C-NOMA, and CoMP FD C-NOMA, should be adopted at the BSs. Now, to assist in designing energy-efficient multiple access techniques and guarantying reliable communication for NOMA UEs, this thesis explores the interplay between FD/HD C-NOMA and RIS. We show that the proposed model has the best performance in terms of network power consumption compared to other multiple access techniques in the literature, which leads to ``green'' future wireless networks. Moreover, our results show that the network power consumption can be significantly reduced by increasing the number of RIS elements. A more significant finding is that the location of the RIS depends on the adopted multiple access techniques. For example, it is not recommended to deploy the RIS besides the BS if the adopted multiple access is HD C-NOMA. Another insight that has been unveiled is the FD C-NOMA with the assistance of RIS has more resistance to the residual SI effect, due to the FD transmission, and can tolerate high SI values compared to the same scheme without RIS. Although much work has been conducted to improve the network spectral efficiency of multi-cell NOMA cellular networks, the required QoS by the upcoming 6G applications, in terms of the minimum achievable rate, may not be guaranteed at CEUs. This is due to their distant locations from their serving BSs, and thus, they experience severe path-loss attenuation and high ICI. This thesis addresses this research gap by studying the synergistic integration between RIS, NOMA, and CoMP in a multi-user multi-cell scenario. Unlike the developed high-complexity optimal solutions or the low-complexity sub-optimal solutions in the literature for the power allocation problem, we derive a low-complexity optimal solution in a such challenging scenario. We also consider the interdependency between the user clustering policies in different coordinated cells, which has been ignored in the literature. Finally, we prove that this integration between RIS, NOMA, and CoMP can attain a high achievable rate for CEUs, ameliorate spectral efficiency compared to existing literature, and can form a novel paradigm for NGMA