Partially-Distributed Resource Allocation in Small-Cell Networks

We propose a four-stage hierarchical resource allocation scheme for the downlink of a large-scale small-cell network in the context of orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA). Since interference limits the capabilities of such networks, resource allocation and interference management are crucial. However, obtaining the globally optimum resource allocation is exponentially complex and mathematically intractable. Here, we develop a partially decentralized algorithm to obtain an effective solution. The three major advantages of our work are: 1) as opposed to a fixed resource allocation, we consider load demand at each access point (AP) when allocating spectrum; 2) to prevent overloaded APs, our scheme is dynamic in the sense that as the users move from one AP to the other, so do the allocated resources, if necessary, and such considerations generally result in huge computational complexity, which brings us to the third advantage: 3) we tackle complexity by introducing a hierarchical scheme comprising four phases: user association, load estimation, interference management via graph coloring, and scheduling. We provide mathematical analysis for the first three steps modeling the user and AP locations as Poisson point processes. Finally, we provide results of numerical simulations to illustrate the efficacy of our scheme.Comment: Accepted on May 15, 2014 for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Fractional frequency reused based interference mitigation in irregular geometry multicellular networks

Recent drastic growth in the mobile broadband services specifically with the proliferation of smart phones demands for higher spectrum capacity of wireless cellular systems. Due to the scarcity of the frequency spectrum, cellular systems are seeking aggressive frequency reuse, which improve the network capacity, however, at the expense of increased Inter Cell Interference (ICI). Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) scheme has been acknowledged as an effective ICI mitigation scheme, however, in literature FFR has been used mostly in perfect geometry network. In realistic deployment, the cellular geometry is irregular and each cell experiences varying ICI. The main objective of this thesis is to develop ICI mitigation scheme that improves spectrum efficiency and throughput for irregular geometry multicellular network. Irregular Geometry Sectored-Fractional Frequency Reuse (IGS-FFR) scheme is developed that comprises of cell partitioning and sectoring, and dynamic spectrum partitioning. The cell-partitioning and sectoring allows full frequency reuse within an irregular geometry cell. Nevertheless, the sub-regions in an irregular cell have varying coverage areas and thus demands diverse spectrum requirements. The IGSFFR scheme is designed to dynamically allocate the spectrum resources according to the traffic demands of each sub-region. An enhanced IGS-FFR has been developed to optimally allocate the spectrum resources to individual users of each sub-region. Enhanced IGS-FFR has been realized using two different approaches, Auction based Optimized IGS-FFR (AO-IGS-FFR) and Hungarian based Optimized IGS-FFR (HO-IGS-FFR). The results show that IGS-FFR has significantly improved the cell throughput by 89%, 45% and 18% and users’ satisfaction by 112%, 65.8% and 38% compared to Reuse-1, Strict-FFR and FFR-3 schemes, respectively. The findings show that the ICI mitigation in IGS-FFR is reinforced by users’ satisfaction. As the number of sectors in IGS-FFR increases from 3 to 4 and 6, the cell throughput increase by 21% and 33% because of spatial diversity exploitation along with orthogonal sub-band allocation. AO-IGS-FFR and HO-IGS-FFR have further improved the cell throughput of the basic FFR-3 by 65% and 72.2%, respectively. HO-IGS-FFR performs 7% better than the AO-IGS-FFR at the expense of 26.7% decrease in the users’ satisfaction and excessive complexity. Although, AO-IGS-FFR compromises sub-optimal bandwidth allocation, it is a low complexity scheme and can mitigate ICI with high users’ satisfaction. The enhanced IGS-FFR can be deployed in future heterogeneous irregular geometry multicellular OFDMA networks

Distributed resource allocation for inter cell interference mitigation in irregular geometry multicell networks

Extensive increase in mobile broadband applications and proliferation of smart phones and gadgets require higher data rates of wireless cellular networks. However, limited frequency spectrum has led to aggressive frequency reuse to improve network capacity at the expense of increased Inter Cell Interference (ICI). Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) has been acknowledged as an effective ICI mitigation scheme but in irregular geometric multicellular network, ICI mitigation poses a very challenging issue. The thesis developed a decentralized ICI mitigation scheme to improve both spectral and energy efficiency in irregular geometric multicellular networks. ICI mitigation was realized through Distributed Resource Allocation (DRA) deployed at the cell level and region level of an irregular geometric cell. The irregular geometric cell consists of a minimum of four regions comprising three sectors and a central region. DRA at the cell level is defined as Multi Sector DRA (MSDRA), and at the region level is defined as Distributed Channel Selection and Power Allocation (DCSPA). MSDRA allocates discrete power to every region in a cell based on Game Theory and Regret Learning Process with correlated equilibrium as the optimum decision level. The DCSPA allocates power to every channel in a region based on non-coalesce liquid droplet phenomena by selecting optimum channels in a region and reserving appropriate power for the selected channels. The performance was evaluated through simulation in terms of data rate, spectral efficiency and energy efficiency. The results showed that MSDRA significantly improved cell data rate by 58.64% and 37.92% in comparision to Generalized FFR and Fractional Frequency Reuse-3 (FFR-3) schemes, respectively. The performance of MSDRA at the cell level showed that its spectral and energy efficiency improved 32% and 22%, respectively in comparison to FFR-3. When the number of sectors increased from three to four, data rate was improved by 30.26% and for three to six sectors, it was improved by 56.32%. The DCSPA further improved data rate by 41.07% when compared with Geometric Water Filling, and 86.46% in comparison to Asynchronous Iterative Water Filling. The DCSPA enhanced data rate achieved in MSDRA by 15.6%. Overall, DRA has shown to have significant improvement in data rate by 53.6%, and spectral efficiency by 38.10% as compared to FFR-3. As a conclusion, the DRA scheme is a potential candidate for Long Term Evaluation – Advanced, Fifth Generation networks and can be deployed in future heterogeneous irregular geometric multicellular Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access networks

Practical feasibility, scalability and effectiveness of coordinated scheduling algorithms in cellular networks towards 5G

Coordinated Scheduling (CS) is used to mitigate inter-cell interference in present (4G) and future (5G) cellular networks. We show that coordination of a cluster of nodes can be formulated as an optimization problem, i.e., placing the Resource Blocks (RB) in each node’s subframe with the least possible over-lapping with neighboring nodes. We provide a clever formulation, which allows optimal solutions to be computed in clusters of ten nodes, and algorithms that compute good suboptimal solutions for clusters of tens of nodes, fast enough for a network to respond to traffic changes in real time. This allows us to assess the relationship between the scale at which CS is performed and its benefits in terms of network energy efficiency and cell-edge user rate. Our results, obtained using realistic power, radiation and Signal-to-Interference-and-Noise-Ratio (SINR) models, show that optimal CS allows a significant protection of cell-edge users. Moreover, this goes hand-in-hand with a reduction in the num-ber of allocated RBs, which in turn allows an operator to reduce its energy consumption. Both benefits actually increase with the size of the clusters. The evaluation is carried out in both a 4G and a foreseen 5G setting, using different power models, system bandwidths and SINR-to-datarate mappings

Joint relay selection and bandwidth allocation for cooperative relay network

Cooperative communication that exploits multiple relay links offers significant performance improvement in terms of coverage and capacity for mobile data subscribers in hierarchical cellular network. Since cooperative communication utilizes multiple relay links, complexity of the network is increased due to the needs for efficient resource allocation. Besides, usage of multiple relay links leads to Inter- Cell Interference (ICI). The main objective of this thesis is to develop efficient resource allocation scheme minimizes the effect of ICI in cooperative relay network. The work proposed a joint relay selection and bandwidth allocation in cooperative relay network that ensures high achievable data rate with high user satisfaction and low outage percentage. Two types of network models are considered: single cell network and multicell network. Joint Relay Selection and Bandwidth Allocation with Spatial Reuse (JReSBA_SR) and Optimized JReSBA_SR (O_JReSBA_SR) are developed for single cell network. JReSBA_SR considers link quality and user demand for resource allocation, and is equipped with spatial reuse to support higher network load. O_JReSBA_SR is an enhancement of JReSBA_SR with decision strategy based on Markov optimization. In multicell network, JReSBA with Interference Mitigation (JReSBA_IM) and Optimized JReSBA_IM (O_JReSBA_IM) are developed. JReSBA_IM deploys sectored-Fractional Frequency Reuse (sectored- FFR) partitioning concept in order to minimize the effect of ICI between adjacent cells. The performance is evaluated in terms of cell achievable rate, Outage Percentage (OP) and Satisfaction Index (SI). The result for single cell network shows that JReSBA_SR has notably improved the cell achievable rate by 35.0%, with reduced OP by 17.7% compared to non-joint scheme at the expense of slight increase in complexity at Relay Node (RN). O_JReSBA_SR has further improved the cell achievable rate by 13.9% while maintaining the outage performance with reduced complexity compared to JReSBA_SR due to the effect of optimization. The result for multicell network shows that JReSBA_IM enhances the cell achievable rate up to 65.1% and reduces OP by 35.0% as compared to benchmark scheme. Similarly, O_JReSBA_IM has significantly reduced the RN complexity of JReSBA_IM scheme, improved the cell achievable rate up to 9.3% and reduced OP by 1.3%. The proposed joint resource allocation has significantly enhanced the network performance through spatial frequency reuse, efficient, fair and optimized resource allocation. The proposed resource allocation is adaptable to variation of network load and can be used in any multihop cellular network such as Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network

Survey of ICIC Techniques in LTE Networks under Various Mobile Environment Parameters

International audienc

A survey of self organisation in future cellular networks

This article surveys the literature over the period of the last decade on the emerging field of self organisation as applied to wireless cellular communication networks. Self organisation has been extensively studied and applied in adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks and autonomic computer networks; however in the context of wireless cellular networks, this is the first attempt to put in perspective the various efforts in form of a tutorial/survey. We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, projects and standards in self organising cellular networks. Additionally, we also aim to present a clear understanding of this active research area, identifying a clear taxonomy and guidelines for design of self organising mechanisms. We compare strength and weakness of existing solutions and highlight the key research areas for further development. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone willing to delve into research on self organisation in wireless cellular communication networks

Dynamic Fractional Frequency Reuse Based On An Improved Water-Filling For Network MIMO

In Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) systems, Inter-cell Interference (ICI) is a prominent limiting factor that affects the performance of the systems, especially at the cell edges. Based on the literature, Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) methods are known as efficient interference management techniques. In this report, the proposed Dynamic Fractional Frequency Reuse (DFFR) technique improved the capacity and cell edge coverage performance by 70% compared to the Fractional Frequency Reuse (FFR) technique. In this study, an improved power allocation method was adopted into the DFFR technique to reach the goal of not only reducing the ICI mitigation at the cell edges, but also improving the overall capacity of the LTE-A systems. Hence, an improved water-filling algorithm was proposed, and its performance was compared with that of other methods that were considered. Through the simulation results and comparisons with other frequency reuse techniques, it was shown that the proposed method significantly improved the performance of the cell edge throughput by 42%, the capacity by 75%, and the coverage by 80%. Based on the analysis and numerical expressions, it was concluded that the proposed DFFR method provides significant performance improvements, especially for cell edge users

Autonomous Algorithms for Centralized and Distributed Interference Coordination: A Virtual Layer Based Approach

Interference mitigation techniques are essential for improving the performance of interference limited wireless networks. In this paper, we introduce novel interference mitigation schemes for wireless cellular networks with space division multiple access (SDMA). The schemes are based on a virtual layer that captures and simplifies the complicated interference situation in the network and that is used for power control. We show how optimization in this virtual layer generates gradually adapting power control settings that lead to autonomous interference minimization. Thereby, the granularity of control ranges from controlling frequency sub-band power via controlling the power on a per-beam basis, to a granularity of only enforcing average power constraints per beam. In conjunction with suitable short-term scheduling, our algorithms gradually steer the network towards a higher utility. We use extensive system-level simulations to compare three distributed algorithms and evaluate their applicability for different user mobility assumptions. In particular, it turns out that larger gains can be achieved by imposing average power constraints and allowing opportunistic scheduling instantaneously, rather than controlling the power in a strict way. Furthermore, we introduce a centralized algorithm, which directly solves the underlying optimization and shows fast convergence, as a performance benchmark for the distributed solutions. Moreover, we investigate the deviation from global optimality by comparing to a branch-and-bound-based solution.Comment: revised versio