Effective Capacity in Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

Low latency applications, such as multimedia communications, autonomous vehicles, and Tactile Internet are the emerging applications for next-generation wireless networks, such as 5th generation (5G) mobile networks. Existing physical-layer channel models, however, do not explicitly consider quality-of-service (QoS) aware related parameters under specific delay constraints. To investigate the performance of low-latency applications in future networks, a new mathematical framework is needed. Effective capacity (EC), which is a link-layer channel model with QoS-awareness, can be used to investigate the performance of wireless networks under certain statistical delay constraints. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on existing works, that use the EC model in various wireless networks. We summarize the work related to EC for different networks such as cognitive radio networks (CRNs), cellular networks, relay networks, adhoc networks, and mesh networks. We explore five case studies encompassing EC operation with different design and architectural requirements. We survey various delay-sensitive applications such as voice and video with their EC analysis under certain delay constraints. We finally present the future research directions with open issues covering EC maximization

Distributed Scheduling in Multiple Access with Bursty Arrivals and Delay Constraints

A multiple access system with bursty data arrivals to the terminals is considered. The users are frame-synchronized, with variable sized packets independently arriving in each slot at every transmitter. Each packet needs to be delivered to a common receiver within a certain number of slots specified by a maximum delay constraint. The key assumption is that the terminals know only their own packet arrival process, i.e. the arrivals at the rest of the terminals are unknown to each transmitter, except for their statistics. For this interesting distributed multiple access model, we design novel online communication schemes which transport the arriving data without any outage, while ensuring the delay constraint. In particular, the transmit powers in each slot are chosen in a distributed manner, ensuring at the same time that the joint power vector is sufficient to support the distributed choice of data-rates employed in that slot. The proposed schemes not only are optimal for minimizing the average transmit sum-power, but they also considerably outperform conventional orthogonal multiple access techniques like TDMA.Comment: 39 pages, 16 figures, presented in part at ISIT 201

Delay-limited Source and Channel Coding of Quasi-Stationary Sources over Block Fading Channels: Design and Scaling Laws

In this paper, delay-limited transmission of quasi-stationary sources over block fading channels are considered. Considering distortion outage probability as the performance measure, two source and channel coding schemes with power adaptive transmission are presented. The first one is optimized for fixed rate transmission, and hence enjoys simplicity of implementation. The second one is a high performance scheme, which also benefits from optimized rate adaptation with respect to source and channel states. In high SNR regime, the performance scaling laws in terms of outage distortion exponent and asymptotic outage distortion gain are derived, where two schemes with fixed transmission power and adaptive or optimized fixed rates are considered as benchmarks for comparisons. Various analytical and numerical results are provided which demonstrate a superior performance for source and channel optimized rate and power adaptive scheme. It is also observed that from a distortion outage perspective, the fixed rate adaptive power scheme substantially outperforms an adaptive rate fixed power scheme for delay-limited transmission of quasi-stationary sources over wireless block fading channels. The effect of the characteristics of the quasi-stationary source on performance, and the implication of the results for transmission of stationary sources are also investigated.Comment: 22 pages,5 figure

Channel-Adaptive Sensing Strategy for Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

In Cognitive Radio (CR) ad hoc networks, secondary users (SU) attempt to utilize valuable spectral resources without causing significant interference to licensed primary users (PU). While there is a large body of research on spectrum opportunity detection, exploitation, and adaptive transmission in CR, most existing approaches focus only on avoiding PU activity when making sensing decisions. Since the myopic sensing strategy results in congestion and poor throughput, several collision-avoidance sensing approaches were investigated in the literature. However, they provide limited improvement. A channel-aware myopic sensing strategy that adapts the reward to the fading channel state information (CSI) of the SU link is proposed. This CSI varies over the CR spectrum and from one SU pair to another due to multipath and shadow fading, thus randomizing sensing decisions and increasing the network throughput. The proposed joint CSI adaptation at the medium access control (MAC) and physical layers provides large throughput gain over randomized sensing strategies and/or conventional adaptive transmission methods. The performance of the proposed CSI-aided sensing strategy is validated for practical network scenarios and demonstrated to be robust to CSI mismatch, sensing errors, and spatial channel correlation.Comment: 6 pages, 8 figures, CCNC 201

Power Control and Performance Analysis of Outage-Limited Cellular Network with MUD-SIC and Macro-Diversity

In this paper, we analyze the uplink goodput (bits/sec/Hz successfully decoded) and per-user packet outage in a cellular network using multi-user detection with successive interference cancellation (MUD-SIC). We consider non-ergodic fading channels where microscopic fading channel information is not available at the transmitters. As a result, packet outage occurs whenever the data rate of packet transmissions exceeds the instantaneous mutual information even if powerful channel coding is applied for protection. We are interested to study the role of macro-diversity (MDiv) between multiple base stations on the MUD-SIC performance where the effect of potential error-propagation during the SIC processing is taken into account. While the jointly optimal power and decoding order in the MUD-SIC are NP hard problem, we derive a simple on/off power control and asymptotically optimal decoding order with respect to the transmit power. Based on the information theoretical framework, we derive the closed-form expressions on the total system goodput as well as the per-user packet outage probability. We show that the system goodput does not scale with SNR due to mutual interference in the SIC process and macro-diversity (MDiv) could alleviate the problem and benefit to the system goodput

Power Controlled Adaptive Sum-Capacity of Fading MACs with Distributed CSI

We consider the problem of finding optimal, fair and distributed power-rate strategies to achieve the sum capacity of the Gaussian multiple-access block-fading channel. In here, the transmitters have access to only their own fading coefficients, while the receiver has global access to all the fading coefficients. Outage is not permitted in any communication block. The resulting average sum-throughput is also known as `power-controlled adaptive sum-capacity', which appears as an open problem in literature. This paper presents the power-controlled adaptive sum-capacity of a wide-class of popular MAC models. In particular, we propose a power-rate strategy in the presence of distributed channel state information (CSI), which is throughput optimal when all the users have identical channel statistics. The proposed scheme also has an efficient implementation using successive cancellation and rate-splitting. We propose an upperbound when the channel laws are not identical. Furthermore, the optimal schemes are extended to situations in which each transmitter has additional finite-rate partial CSI on the link quality of others.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, combined and extended version of ITW 2011 and ISITA 2012 paper

Effective Capacity Analysis of Cognitive Radio Channels for Quality of Service Provisioning

In this paper, cognitive transmission under quality of service (QoS) constraints is studied. In the cognitive radio channel model, it is assumed that the secondary transmitter sends the data at two different average power levels, depending on the activity of the primary users, which is determined by channel sensing performed by the secondary users. A state-transition model is constructed for this cognitive transmission channel. Statistical limitations on the buffer lengths are imposed to take into account the QoS constraints. The maximum throughput under these statistical QoS constraints is identified by finding the effective capacity of the cognitive radio channel. This analysis is conducted for fixed-power/fixed-rate, fixed-power/variable-rate, and variable-power/variable-rate transmission schemes under different assumptions on the availability of channel side information (CSI) at the transmitter. The impact upon the effective capacity of several system parameters, including channel sensing duration, detection threshold, detection and false alarm probabilities, QoS parameters, and transmission rates, is investigated. The performances of fixed-rate and variable-rate transmission methods are compared in the presence of QoS limitations. It is shown that variable schemes outperform fixed-rate transmission techniques if the detection probabilities are high. Performance gains through adapting the power and rate are quantified and it is shown that these gains diminish as the QoS limitations become more stringent

On Green Multicasting over Cognitive Radio Fading Channels

In this paper, an underlay cognitive radio (CR) multicast network, consisting of a cognitive base station (CBS) and multiple multicast groups of secondary users (SUs), is considered. All SUs, belonging to a particular multicast group, are served by the CBS using a common primary user (PU) channel. The goal is to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the system, through dynamic adaptation of target rate and transmit power for each multicast group, under the PUs' individual interference constraints. The optimization problem formulated for this is proved to be non quasi-concave with respect to the joint variation of the CBS's transmit power and target rate. An efficient iterative algorithm for EE maximization is proposed along with its complexity analysis. Simulation results illustrate the performance gain of our proposed scheme.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, Submitted in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technolog

On the Capacity of Joint Fading and Two-path Shadowing Channels

The ergodic and outage channel capacity of different optimal and suboptimal combinations of transmit power and modulation rate adaptation strategies over a joint fading and two-path shadowing (JFTS) fading/shadowing channel is studied in this paper. Analytically tractable expressions for channel capacity are obtained, assuming perfect channel side information (CSI) at the receiver and/or the transmitter with negligible feedback delay. Furthermore, the impacts of the JFTS parameters on the channel capacity achieved by these adaptive transmission techniques are determined

An Intercell Interference Model based on Scheduling for Future Generation Wireless Networks (Part 1 and Part 2)

This technical report is divided into two parts. The first part of the technical report presents a novel framework for modeling the uplink and downlink intercell interference (ICI) in a multiuser cellular network. The proposed framework assists in quantifying the impact of various fading channel models and multiuser scheduling schemes on the uplink and downlink ICI. Firstly, we derive a semi-analytical expression for the distribution of the location of the scheduled user in a given cell considering a wide range of scheduling schemes. Based on this, we derive the distribution and moment generating function (MGF) of the ICI considering a single interfering cell. Consequently, we determine the MGF of the cumulative ICI observed from all interfering cells and derive explicit MGF expressions for three typical fading models. Finally, we utilize the obtained expressions to evaluate important network performance metrics such as the outage probability, ergodic capacity and average fairness numerically. Monte-Carlo simulation results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy of the derived analytical expressions {\bf The first part of the technical report is currently submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications}. The second part of the technical report deals with the statistical modeling of uplink inter-cell interference (ICI) considering greedy scheduling with power adaptation based on channel conditions. The derived model is utilized to evaluate important network performance metrics such as ergodic capacity, average fairness and average power preservation numerically. In parallel to the literature, we have shown that greedy scheduling with power adaptation reduces the ICI, average power consumption of users, and enhances the average fairness among users, compared to the case without power adaptation