Joint user scheduling, precoder design, and transmit direction selection in MIMO TDD small cell networks

©2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.New short-length single-direction frame structures are proposed for 5G time division duplex (TDD) systems, where the transmit direction [i.e., either downlink (DL) or uplink (UL)] can be independently chosen at each cell in every frame. Accordingly, high flexibility is provided to match the per-cell DL/UL traffic asymmetries and full exploitation of dynamic TDD is allowed. As a downside, interference management becomes crucial. In this regard, this paper proposes a procedure for dynamic TDD in dense multiple-input multiple-output small cell networks, where the transmit direction selected per small cell (SC) is dynamically optimized together with the user scheduling and transmit precoding. We focus on the maximization of a general utility function that takes into account the DL/UL traffic asymmetries of each user and the interference conditions in the network. Although the problem is non-convex, it is decomposed thanks to the interference-cost concept and then efficiently solved in parallel. Simulation results show gains in DL and UL average rates for different traffic asymmetries and SC/user densities as compared to existing dynamic TDD schemes thanks to the proposed joint optimization. The gains become more significant when there is high interference and limited number of antennas.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Dynamic Time-domain Duplexing for Self-backhauled Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks

Millimeter wave (mmW) bands between 30 and 300 GHz have attracted considerable attention for next-generation cellular networks due to vast quantities of available spectrum and the possibility of very high-dimensional antenna ar-rays. However, a key issue in these systems is range: mmW signals are extremely vulnerable to shadowing and poor high-frequency propagation. Multi-hop relaying is therefore a natural technology for such systems to improve cell range and cell edge rates without the addition of wired access points. This paper studies the problem of scheduling for a simple infrastructure cellular relay system where communication between wired base stations and User Equipment follow a hierarchical tree structure through fixed relay nodes. Such a systems builds naturally on existing cellular mmW backhaul by adding mmW in the access links. A key feature of the proposed system is that TDD duplexing selections can be made on a link-by-link basis due to directional isolation from other links. We devise an efficient, greedy algorithm for centralized scheduling that maximizes network utility by jointly optimizing the duplexing schedule and resources allocation for dense, relay-enhanced OFDMA/TDD mmW networks. The proposed algorithm can dynamically adapt to loading, channel conditions and traffic demands. Significant throughput gains and improved resource utilization offered by our algorithm over the static, globally-synchronized TDD patterns are demonstrated through simulations based on empirically-derived channel models at 28 GHz.Comment: IEEE Workshop on Next Generation Backhaul/Fronthaul Networks - BackNets 201

Interference Spins: Scheduling of Multiple Interfering Two-Way Wireless Links

Two-way is a dominant mode of communication in wireless systems. Departing from the tradition to optimize each transmission direction separately, recent work has demonstrated that, for time-division duplex (TDD) systems, optimizing the schedule of the two transmission directions depending on traffic load and interference condition leads to performance gains. In this letter, a general network of multiple interfering two-way links is studied under the assumption of a balanced load in the two directions for each link. Using the notion of interference spin, we introduce an algebraic framework for the optimization of two-way scheduling, along with an efficient optimization algorithm that is based on the pruning of a properly defined topology graph and dynamic programming. Numerical results demonstrate multi-fold rate gains with respect to baseline solutions, especially for worst-case (5%-ile) rates.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Letter