Radio Resource Management Optimization For Next Generation Wireless Networks

The prominent versatility of today’s mobile broadband services and the rapid advancements in the cellular phones industry have led to a tremendous expansion in the wireless market volume. Despite the continuous progress in the radio-access technologies to cope with that expansion, many challenges still remain that need to be addressed by both the research and industrial sectors. One of the many remaining challenges is the efficient allocation and management of wireless network resources when using the latest cellular radio technologies (e.g., 4G). The importance of the problem stems from the scarcity of the wireless spectral resources, the large number of users sharing these resources, the dynamic behavior of generated traffic, and the stochastic nature of wireless channels. These limitations are further tightened as the provider’s commitment to high quality-of-service (QoS) levels especially data rate, delay and delay jitter besides the system’s spectral and energy efficiencies. In this dissertation, we strive to solve this problem by presenting novel cross-layer resource allocation schemes to address the efficient utilization of available resources versus QoS challenges using various optimization techniques. The main objective of this dissertation is to propose a new predictive resource allocation methodology using an agile ray tracing (RT) channel prediction approach. It is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the theoretical and implementational aspects of the ray tracing prediction model, and its validation. In the second part, a novel RT-based scheduling system within the evolving cloud radio access network (C-RAN) architecture is proposed. The impact of the proposed model on addressing the long term evolution (LTE) network limitations is then rigorously investigated in the form of optimization problems. The main contributions of this dissertation encompass the design of several heuristic solutions based on our novel RT-based scheduling model, developed to meet the aforementioned objectives while considering the co-existing limitations in the context of LTE networks. Both analytical and numerical methods are used within this thesis framework. Theoretical results are validated with numerical simulations. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions to meet the objectives subject to limitations and constraints compared to other published works

Energy efficient OFDMA networks maintaining statistical QoS guarantees for delay-sensitive traffic

An energy-efficient design is proposed under specific statistical quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees for delay-sensitive traffic in the downlink orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) networks. This design is based on Wu’s effective capacity (EC) concept [1], which characterizes the maximum throughput of a system subject to statistical delay-QoS requirements at the data-link layer. In the particular context considered, our main contributions consist of quantifying the effective energy-efficiency (EEE)-versus-EC tradeoff and characterizing the delay sensitive traffic as a function of the QoS-exponent ?, which expresses the exponential decay rate of the delay-QoS violation probabilities. Upon exploiting the properties of fractional programming, the originally quasi-concave EEE optimization problem having a fractional form is transformed into a subtractive optimization problem by applying Dinkelbach’s method. As a result, an iterative inner-outer loop based resource allocation algorithm is conceived for efficiently solving the transformed EEE optimization problem. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme converges within a few Dinkelbach iterations to the desired solution accuracy. Furthermore, the impact of the circuitry power, of the QoS-exponent and of the power amplifier inefficiency is characterized numerically. These results reveal that the optimally allocated power maximizing the EEE decays exponentially with respect to both the circuitry power and the QoS-exponent, whilst decaying linearly with respect to the power amplifier inefficiency

Priority-Based Resource Allocation for Downlink OFDMA Systems Supporting RT and NRT Traffics

Efficient radio resource management is essential in Quality-of-Service (QoS) provisioning for wireless communication networks. In this paper, we propose a novel priority-based packet scheduling algorithm for downlink OFDMA systems. The proposed algorithm is designed to support heterogeneous applications consisting of both real-time (RT) and non-real-time (NRT) traffics with the objective to increase the spectrum efficiency while satisfying diverse QoS requirements. It tightly couples the subchannel allocation and packet scheduling together through an integrated cross-layer approach in which each packet is assigned a priority value based on both the instantaneous channel conditions as well as the QoS constraints. An efficient suboptimal heuristic algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational complexity with marginal performance degradation compared to the optimal solution. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the system performance in terms of high spectral efficiency and low outage probability compared to conventional packet scheduling algorithms, thus is very suitable for the downlink of current OFDMA systems

Analysis Framework for Opportunistic Spectrum OFDMA and its Application to the IEEE 802.22 Standard

We present an analytical model that enables throughput evaluation of Opportunistic Spectrum Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OS-OFDMA) networks. The core feature of the model, based on a discrete time Markov chain, is the consideration of different channel and subchannel allocation strategies under different Primary and Secondary user types, traffic and priority levels. The analytical model also assesses the impact of different spectrum sensing strategies on the throughput of OS-OFDMA network. The analysis applies to the IEEE 802.22 standard, to evaluate the impact of two-stage spectrum sensing strategy and varying temporal activity of wireless microphones on the IEEE 802.22 throughput. Our study suggests that OS-OFDMA with subchannel notching and channel bonding could provide almost ten times higher throughput compared with the design without those options, when the activity and density of wireless microphones is very high. Furthermore, we confirm that OS-OFDMA implementation without subchannel notching, used in the IEEE 802.22, is able to support real-time and non-real-time quality of service classes, provided that wireless microphones temporal activity is moderate (with approximately one wireless microphone per 3,000 inhabitants with light urban population density and short duty cycles). Finally, two-stage spectrum sensing option improves OS-OFDMA throughput, provided that the length of spectrum sensing at every stage is optimized using our model