Leveraging Synergy of 5G SDWN and Multi-Layer Resource Management for Network Optimization

Fifth-generation (5G) cellular wireless networks are envisioned to predispose service-oriented, flexible, and spectrum/energy-efficient edge-to-core infrastructure, aiming to offer diverse applications. Convergence of software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined radio (SDR) compatible with multiple radio access technologies (RATs), and virtualization on the concept of 5G software-defined wireless networking (5G-SDWN) is a promising approach to provide such a dynamic network. The principal technique behind the 5G-SDWN framework is the separation of the control and data planes, from the deep core entities to edge wireless access points (APs). This separation allows the abstraction of resources as transmission parameters of each user over the 5G-SDWN. In this user-centric and service-oriented environment, resource management plays a critical role to achieve efficiency and reliability. However, it is natural to wonder if 5G-SDWN can be leveraged to enable converged multi-layer resource management over the portfolio of resources, and reciprocally, if CML resource management can effectively provide performance enhancement and reliability for 5G-SDWN. We believe that replying to these questions and investigating this mutual synergy are not trivial, but multidimensional and complex for 5G-SDWN, which consists of different technologies and also inherits legacy generations of wireless networks. In this paper, we propose a flexible protocol structure based on three mentioned pillars for 5G-SDWN, which can handle all the required functionalities in a more crosslayer manner. Based on this, we demonstrate how the general framework of CML resource management can control the end user quality of experience. For two scenarios of 5G-SDWN, we investigate the effects of joint user-association and resource allocation via CML resource management to improve performance in a virtualized network

An Energy-Aware WLAN Discovery Scheme for LTE HetNet

Recently, there has been significant interest in the integration and co-existence of Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) Long Term Evolution (LTE) with other Radio Access Technologies, like IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs). Although, the inter-working of IEEE 802.11 WLANs with 3GPP LTE has indicated enhanced network performance in the context of capacity and load balancing, the WLAN discovery scheme implemented in most of the commercially available smartphones is very inefficient and results in high battery drainage. In this paper, we have proposed an energy efficient WLAN discovery scheme for 3GPP LTE and IEEE 802.11 WLAN inter-working scenario. User Equipment (UE), in the proposed scheme, uses 3GPP network assistance along with the results of past channel scans, to optimally select the next channels to scan. Further, we have also developed an algorithm to accurately estimate the UE's mobility state, using 3GPP network signal strength patterns. We have implemented various discovery schemes in Android framework, to evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme against other solutions in the literature. Since, Android does not support selective scanning mode, we have implemented modules in Android to enable selective scanning. Further, we have also used simulation studies and justified the results using power consumption modeling. The results from the field experiments and simulations have shown high power savings using the proposed scanning scheme without any discovery performance deterioration

IEEE 802.11ay based mmWave WLANs: Design Challenges and Solutions

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) with large spectrum available is considered as the most promising frequency band for future wireless communications. The IEEE 802.11ad and IEEE 802.11ay operating on 60 GHz mmWave are the two most expected wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies for ultra-high-speed communications. For the IEEE 802.11ay standard still under development, there are plenty of proposals from companies and researchers who are involved with the IEEE 802.11ay task group. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive review on the medium access control layer (MAC) related issues for the IEEE 802.11ay, some cross-layer between physical layer (PHY) and MAC technologies are also included. We start with MAC related technologies in the IEEE 802.11ad and discuss design challenges on mmWave communications, leading to some MAC related technologies for the IEEE 802.11ay. We then elaborate on important design issues for IEEE 802.11ay. Specifically, we review the channel bonding and aggregation for the IEEE 802.11ay, and point out the major differences between the two technologies. Then, we describe channel access and channel allocation in the IEEE 802.11ay, including spatial sharing and interference mitigation technologies. After that, we present an in-depth survey on beamforming training (BFT), beam tracking, single-user multiple-input-multiple-output (SU-MIMO) beamforming and multi-user multiple-input-multiple-output (MU-MIMO) beamforming. Finally, we discuss some open design issues and future research directions for mmWave WLANs. We hope that this paper provides a good introduction to this exciting research area for future wireless systems.Comment: 27 pages, 33 figures. Accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

QoS in IEEE 802.11-based Wireless Networks: A Contemporary Survey

Apart from mobile cellular networks, IEEE 802.11-based wireless local area networks (WLANs) represent the most widely deployed wireless networking technology. With the migration of critical applications onto data networks, and the emergence of multimedia applications such as digital audio/video and multimedia games, the success of IEEE 802.11 depends critically on its ability to provide quality of service (QoS). A lot of research has focused on equipping IEEE 802.11 WLANs with features to support QoS. In this survey, we provide an overview of these techniques. We discuss the QoS features incorporated by the IEEE 802.11 standard at both physical (PHY) and media access control (MAC) layers, as well as other higher-layer proposals. We also focus on how the new architectural developments of software-defined networking (SDN) and cloud networking can be used to facilitate QoS provisioning in IEEE 802.11-based networks. We conclude this paper by identifying some open research issues for future consideration

IEEE 802.11 기반 Enterprise 무선 LAN을 위한 자원 관리 기법

학위논문 (박사)-- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 전기·컴퓨터공학부, 2019. 2. 전화숙.IEEE 802.11이 무선 LAN (wireless local area network, WLAN)의 실질적인 표준이 됨에 따라 수 많은 엑세스 포인트(access points, APs)가 배치되었고, 그 결과 WLAN 밀집 환경이 조성되었다. 이러한 환경에서는, 이웃한 AP들에 동일한 채널을 할당하는 문제를 피할 수 없으며, 이는 해당 AP들이 같은 채널을 공유하게 하고 그로 인한 간섭을 야기한다. 간섭으로 인한 성능 저하를 줄이기 위해 채널 할당(channelization) 기법이 중요하다. 또한, 한 조직이 특정 지역에 밀집 배치된 AP들을 관리한다면 특정 사용자를 서비스할 수 있는 AP가 여럿일 수 있다. 이 경우, 사용자 접속(user association, UA) 기법이 준정적(quasi-static) 환경과 차량 환경 모두에서 네트워크 성능에 큰 영향을 미친다. 본 논문에서는 밀집 배치된 WLAN 환경에서 와이파이(WiFi) 성능 향상을 위해 채널 할당 기법을 제안한다. 먼저, 제안한 기법에서는 각각의 AP에 채널을 할당하기 위해 간섭 그래프(interference graph)를 이용하며 채널 결합(channel bonding)을 고려한다. 다음으로, 주어진 채널 결합 결과를 기반으로 해당 AP가 동적 채널 결합을 지원하는지 여부에 따라 주 채널(primary channel)을 결정한다. 한편, 준정적 환경과 차량 환경에서의 UA 문제는 다소 차이가 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 각각의 환경에 따라 서로 다른 UA 기법을 설계하였다. 준정적 환경에서의 UA 기법은 멀티캐스트 전송, 다중 사용자 MIMO (multi-user multiple input multiple output), 그리고 AP 수면과 같은 다양한 기술과 함께 AP간의 부하 분산(load balancing)과 에너지 절약을 고려한다. 제안하는 기법에서 UA 문제는 다목적함수 최적화 문제로 정식화하였고 그 해를 구하였다. 차량 환경에서의 UA 기법은 핸드오버(handover, HO) 스케줄 문제로 귀결된다. 본 논문에서는 도로의 지형을 고려하여 사용자가 접속할 AP를 결정하는 HO 스케줄 기법을 제안한다. 사용자는 단지 다음 AP로 연결을 맺을 시기만 결정하면 되기 때문에, 차량 환경에서의 매우 빠르고 효율적인 HO 기법을 구현할 수 있다. 이를 위해, 그래프 모델링 기법(graph modeling technique)을 활용하여 도로를 따라 배치된 AP사이의 관계를 표현한다. 현실적인 시나리오를 위해 직선 구간, 우회 구간, 교차로, 그리고 유턴 구간 등을 포함하는 복잡한 도로 구조를 고려한다. 도로 구조를 고려하여 각 사용자의 이동 경로를 예측하고, 그에 기반하여 각 사용자 별 HO의 목적 AP 집합을 선택한다. 제안하는 HO 스케줄 기법의 설계 목적은 HO 지연 시간의 합을 최소화하고 각 AP에서 해당 채널을 사용하려는 사용자 수를 줄이면서 WiFi 연결 시간을 최대화하는 것이다. 마지막으로, 본 논문에서는 준정적 환경에서 제안한 채널 할당 기법과 UA 기법의 현실성을 증명하기 위한 시험대(testbed)를 구성하였다. 또한, 광범위한 시뮬레이션을 통해 준정적 환경과 차량 환경에서 제안한 기법들과 기존의 기법들의 성능을 비교하였다.As the IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) becomes the defacto global standard for wireless local area network (WLAN), a huge number of WiFi access points (APs) are deployed. This condition leads to a densely deployed WLANs. In such environment, the conflicting channel allocation between the neighboring access points (APs) is unavoidable, which causes the channel sharing and interference between APs. Thus, the channel allocation (channelization) scheme has a critical role to tackle this issue. In addition, when densely-deployed APs covering a certain area are managed by a single organization, there can exist multiple candidate APs for serving a user. In this case, the user association (UA), i.e., the selection of serving AP, holds a key role in the network performance both in quasi-static and vehicular environments. To improve the performance of WiFi in a densely deployed WLANs environment, we propose a channelization scheme. The proposed channelization scheme utilizes the interference graph to assign the channel for each AP and considers channel bonding. Then, given the channel bonding assignment, the primary channel location for each AP is determined by observing whether the AP supports the static or dynamic channel bonding. Meanwhile, the UA problem in the quasi-static and vehicular environments are slightly different. Thus, we devise UA schemes both for quasi-static and vehicular environments. The UA schemes for quasi-static environment takes account the load balancing among APs and energy saving, considering various techniques for performance improvement, such as multicast transmission, multi-user MIMO, and AP sleeping, together. Then, we formulate the problem into a multi-objective optimization and get the solution as the UA scheme. On the other hand, the UA scheme in the vehicular environment is realized through handover (HO) scheduling mechanism. Specifically, we propose a HO scheduling scheme running on a server, which determines the AP to which a user will be handed over, considering the road topology. Since a user only needs to decide when to initiate the connection to the next AP, a very fast and efficient HO in the vehicular environment can be realized. For this purpose, we utilize the graph modeling technique to map the relation between APs within the road. We consider a practical scenario where the structure of the road is complex, which includes straight, curve, intersection, and u-turn area. Then, the set of target APs for HO are selected for each user moving on a particular road based-on its moving path which is predicted considering the road topology. The design objective of the proposed HO scheduling is to maximize the connection time on WiFi while minimizing the total HO latency and reducing the number of users which contend for the channel within an AP. Finally, we develop a WLAN testbed to demonstrate the practicality and feasibility of the proposed channelization and UA scheme in a quasi-static environment. Furthermore, through extensive simulations, we compare the performance of the proposed schemes with the existing schemes both in quasi-static and vehicular environments.1 Introduction 1.1 Background and Motivation 1.2 Related Works 1.3 Research Scope and Proposed Schemes 1.3.1 Centralized Channelization Scheme for Wireless LANs Exploiting Channel Bonding 1.3.2 User Association for Load Balancing and Energy Saving in Enterprise WLAN 1.3.3 A Graph-Based Handover Scheduling for Heterogenous Vehicular Networks 1.4 Organization 2 Centralized Channelization Scheme for Wireless LANs Exploiting Channel Bonding 2.1 System Model 2.2 Channel Sharing and Bonding 2.2.1 Interference between APs 2.2.2 Channel Sharing 2.2.3 Channel Bonding 2.3 Channelization Scheme 2.3.1 Building Interference Graph 2.3.2 Channel Allocation 2.3.3 Primary Channel Selection 2.4 Implementation 3 User Association for Load Balancing and Energy Saving in Enterprise Wireless LANs 3.1 System Model 3.1.1 IEEE 802.11 ESS-based Enterprise WLAN 3.1.2 Downlink Achievable Rate for MU-MIMO Groups 3.1.3 Candidate MU-MIMO Groups 3.2 User Association Problem 3.2.1 Factors of UA Objective 3.2.2 Problem Formulation 3.3 User Association Scheme 3.3.1 Equivalent Linear Problem 3.3.2 Solution Algorithm 3.3.3 Computational Complexity (Execution Time) 3.4 Implementation 4 A Graph-Based Handover Scheduling for Heterogenous Vehicular Networks 4.1 System Model 4.2 Graph-Based Modeling 4.2.1 Division of Road Portion into Road Segments 4.2.2 Relation between PoAs on a Road Segment 4.2.3 Directed Graph Representation 4.3 Handover Scheduling Problem 4.3.1 Problem Formulation 4.3.2 Weight of Edge 4.3.3 HO Scheduling Algorithm 4.4 Handover Scheduling Operation 4.4.1 HO Schedule Delivery 4.4.2 HO Triggering and Execution 4.4.3 Communication Overhead 5 Performance Evaluation 5.1 CentralizedChannelizationSchemeforWirelessLANsExploitingChannel Bonding 5.1.1 Experiment Settings 5.1.2 Comparison Schemes 5.1.3 Preliminary Experiment for Building Interference Graph 5.1.4 Experiment Results 5.2 User Association for Load Balancing and Energy Saving in Enterprise Wireless LANs 5.2.1 Performance Metrics 5.2.2 Experiment Settings 5.2.3 Experiment Results 5.2.4 Simulation Settings 5.2.5 Comparison Schemes 5.2.6 Simulation Results 5.2.7 Simulation for MU-MIMO System 5.3 A Graph-BasedHandover Scheduling for Heterogenous Vehicular Networks 5.3.1 Performance Metrics 5.3.2 Simulation Settings 5.3.3 Simulation Results 6 Conculsion Bibliography AcknowledgementsDocto

Reconfigurable Wireless Networks

Driven by the advent of sophisticated and ubiquitous applications, and the ever-growing need for information, wireless networks are without a doubt steadily evolving into profoundly more complex and dynamic systems. The user demands are progressively rampant, while application requirements continue to expand in both range and diversity. Future wireless networks, therefore, must be equipped with the ability to handle numerous, albeit challenging requirements. Network reconfiguration, considered as a prominent network paradigm, is envisioned to play a key role in leveraging future network performance and considerably advancing current user experiences. This paper presents a comprehensive overview of reconfigurable wireless networks and an in-depth analysis of reconfiguration at all layers of the protocol stack. Such networks characteristically possess the ability to reconfigure and adapt their hardware and software components and architectures, thus enabling flexible delivery of broad services, as well as sustaining robust operation under highly dynamic conditions. The paper offers a unifying framework for research in reconfigurable wireless networks. This should provide the reader with a holistic view of concepts, methods, and strategies in reconfigurable wireless networks. Focus is given to reconfigurable systems in relatively new and emerging research areas such as cognitive radio networks, cross-layer reconfiguration and software-defined networks. In addition, modern networks have to be intelligent and capable of self-organization. Thus, this paper discusses the concept of network intelligence as a means to enable reconfiguration in highly complex and dynamic networks. Finally, the paper is supported with several examples and case studies showing the tremendous impact of reconfiguration on wireless networks.Comment: 28 pages, 26 figures; Submitted to the Proceedings of the IEEE (a special issue on Reconfigurable Systems

A Survey on QoE-oriented Wireless Resources Scheduling

Future wireless systems are expected to provide a wide range of services to more and more users. Advanced scheduling strategies thus arise not only to perform efficient radio resource management, but also to provide fairness among the users. On the other hand, the users' perceived quality, i.e., Quality of Experience (QoE), is becoming one of the main drivers within the schedulers design. In this context, this paper starts by providing a comprehension of what is QoE and an overview of the evolution of wireless scheduling techniques. Afterwards, a survey on the most recent QoE-based scheduling strategies for wireless systems is presented, highlighting the application/service of the different approaches reported in the literature, as well as the parameters that were taken into account for QoE optimization. Therefore, this paper aims at helping readers interested in learning the basic concepts of QoE-oriented wireless resources scheduling, as well as getting in touch with its current research frontier.Comment: Revised version: updated according to the most recent related literature; added references; corrected typo

Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Performance and Energy Conservation of 3GPP IFOM Protocol for Dual Connectivity in Heterogeneous LTE-WLAN Network

For the 5th Generation (5G) networks, Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is considering standardization of various solutions for traffic aggregation using licensed and unlicensed spectrum, to meet the rising data demands. IP Flow Mobility (IFOM) is a multi access connectivity solution/protocol standardized by the Internet Engineering Task force (IETF) and 3GPP in Release 10. It enables concurrent access for an User Equipment (UE) to Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets) such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). IFOM enabled UEs have multiple interfaces to connect to HetNets. They can have concurrent flows with different traffic types over these networks and can seamlessly switch the flows from one network to the other. In this paper, we focus on two objectives. First is to investigate the performance parameters e.g. throughput, latency, tunnelling overhead, packet loss, energy cost etc. of IFOM enabled UEs (IeUs) in HetNets of LTE and WLAN. We have proposed a novel mechanism to maximize the throughput of IeUs achieving a significant throughput gain with low latency for the IeUs. We have explored further and observed a throughput energy trade off for low data rate flows. To address this, we also propose a smart energy efficient and throughput optimization algorithm for the IeUs, resulting in a substantial reduction in energy cost, while maintaining the high throughput at lower latency and satisfying the Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the IeUs.Comment: 12 pages, 15 figures, journa

A Survey of Millimeter Wave (mmWave) Communications for 5G: Opportunities and Challenges

With the explosive growth of mobile data demand, the fifth generation (5G) mobile network would exploit the enormous amount of spectrum in the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands to greatly increase communication capacity. There are fundamental differences between mmWave communications and existing other communication systems, in terms of high propagation loss, directivity, and sensitivity to blockage. These characteristics of mmWave communications pose several challenges to fully exploit the potential of mmWave communications, including integrated circuits and system design, interference management, spatial reuse, anti-blockage, and dynamics control. To address these challenges, we carry out a survey of existing solutions and standards, and propose design guidelines in architectures and protocols for mmWave communications. We also discuss the potential applications of mmWave communications in the 5G network, including the small cell access, the cellular access, and the wireless backhaul. Finally, we discuss relevant open research issues including the new physical layer technology, software-defined network architecture, measurements of network state information, efficient control mechanisms, and heterogeneous networking, which should be further investigated to facilitate the deployment of mmWave communication systems in the future 5G networks.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, 7 tables, Journal pape