Multiple Access for Massive Machine Type Communications

The internet we have known thus far has been an internet of people, as it has connected people with one another. However, these connections are forecasted to occupy only a minuscule of future communications. The internet of tomorrow is indeed: the internet of things. The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to improve all aspects of life by connecting everything to everything. An enormous amount of effort is being exerted to turn these visions into a reality. Sensors and actuators will communicate and operate in an automated fashion with no or minimal human intervention. In the current literature, these sensors and actuators are referred to as machines, and the communication amongst these machines is referred to as Machine to Machine (M2M) communication or Machine-Type Communication (MTC). As IoT requires a seamless mode of communication that is available anywhere and anytime, wireless communications will be one of the key enabling technologies for IoT. In existing wireless cellular networks, users with data to transmit first need to request channel access. All access requests are processed by a central unit that in return either grants or denies the access request. Once granted access, users' data transmissions are non-overlapping and interference free. However, as the number of IoT devices is forecasted to be in the order of hundreds of millions, if not billions, in the near future, the access channels of existing cellular networks are predicted to suffer from severe congestion and, thus, incur unpredictable latencies in the system. On the other hand, in random access, users with data to transmit will access the channel in an uncoordinated and probabilistic fashion, thus, requiring little or no signalling overhead. However, this reduction in overhead is at the expense of reliability and efficiency due to the interference caused by contending users. In most existing random access schemes, packets are lost when they experience interference from other packets transmitted over the same resources. Moreover, most existing random access schemes are best-effort schemes with almost no Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees. In this thesis, we investigate the performance of different random access schemes in different settings to resolve the problem of the massive access of IoT devices with diverse QoS guarantees. First, we take a step towards re-designing existing random access protocols such that they are more practical and more efficient. For many years, researchers have adopted the collision channel model in random access schemes: a collision is the event of two or more users transmitting over the same time-frequency resources. In the event of a collision, all the involved data is lost, and users need to retransmit their information. However, in practice, data can be recovered even in the presence of interference provided that the power of the signal is sufficiently larger than the power of the noise and the power of the interference. Based on this, we re-define the event of collision as the event of the interference power exceeding a pre-determined threshold. We propose a new analytical framework to compute the probability of packet recovery failure inspired by error control codes on graph. We optimize the random access parameters based on evolution strategies. Our results show a significant improvement in performance in terms of reliability and efficiency. Next, we focus on supporting the heterogeneous IoT applications and accommodating their diverse latency and reliability requirements in a unified access scheme. We propose a multi-stage approach where each group of applications transmits in different stages with different probabilities. We propose a new analytical framework to compute the probability of packet recovery failure for each group in each stage. We also optimize the random access parameters using evolution strategies. Our results show that our proposed scheme can outperform coordinated access schemes of existing cellular networks when the number of users is very large. Finally, we investigate random non-orthogonal multiple access schemes that are known to achieve a higher spectrum efficiency and are known to support higher loads. In our proposed scheme, user detection and channel estimation are carried out via pilot sequences that are transmitted simultaneously with the user's data. Here, a collision event is defined as the event of two or more users selecting the same pilot sequence. All collisions are regarded as interference to the remaining users. We first study the distribution of the interference power and derive its expression. Then, we use this expression to derive simple yet accurate analytical bounds on the throughput and outage probability of the proposed scheme. We consider both joint decoding as well as successive interference cancellation. We show that the proposed scheme is especially useful in the case of short packet transmission

Machine Learning-Aided Operations and Communications of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Contemporary Survey

The ongoing amalgamation of UAV and ML techniques is creating a significant synergy and empowering UAVs with unprecedented intelligence and autonomy. This survey aims to provide a timely and comprehensive overview of ML techniques used in UAV operations and communications and identify the potential growth areas and research gaps. We emphasise the four key components of UAV operations and communications to which ML can significantly contribute, namely, perception and feature extraction, feature interpretation and regeneration, trajectory and mission planning, and aerodynamic control and operation. We classify the latest popular ML tools based on their applications to the four components and conduct gap analyses. This survey also takes a step forward by pointing out significant challenges in the upcoming realm of ML-aided automated UAV operations and communications. It is revealed that different ML techniques dominate the applications to the four key modules of UAV operations and communications. While there is an increasing trend of cross-module designs, little effort has been devoted to an end-to-end ML framework, from perception and feature extraction to aerodynamic control and operation. It is also unveiled that the reliability and trust of ML in UAV operations and applications require significant attention before full automation of UAVs and potential cooperation between UAVs and humans come to fruition.Comment: 36 pages, 304 references, 19 Figure

Coping with Algebraic Constraints in Power Networks

In the intuitive modelling of the power network, the generators and the loads are located at different subset of nodes. This corresponds to the so-called structure preserving model which is naturally expressed in terms of differential algebraic equations (DAE). The algebraic constraints in the structure preserving model are associated with the load dynamics. Motivated by the fact the presence of the algebraic constraints hinders the analysis and control of power networks, several aggregated models are reported in the literature where each bus of the grid is associated with certain load and generation. The advantage of these aggregated models is mainly due to the fact that they are described by ordinary differential equations (ODE) which facilitates the analysis of the network. However, the explicit relationship between the aggregated model and the original structure preserved model is often missing, which restricts the validity and applicability of the results. Aiming at simplified ODE description of the model together with respecting the heterogenous structure of the power network has endorsed the use of Kron reduced models; see e.g. [2]. In the Kron reduction method, the variables which are exclusive to the algebraic constraints are solved in terms of the rest of the variables. This results in a reduced graph, the (loopy) Laplaican matrix of which is the Schur complement of the (loopy) Laplacian matrix of the original graph. By construction, the Kron reduction technique restricts the class of the applicable load dynamics to linear loads. The algebraic constraints can also be solved in the case of frequency dependent loads where the active power drawn by each load consists of a constant term and a frequencydependent term [1],[3]. However, in the popular class of constant power loads, the algebraic constraints are “proper”, meaning that they are not explicitly solvable. In this talk, first we revisit the Kron reduction method for the linear case, where the Schur complement of the Laplacian matrix (which is again a Laplacian) naturally appears in the network dynamics. It turns out that the usual decomposition of the reduced Laplacian matrix leads to a state space realization which contains merely partial information of the original power network, and the frequency behavior of the loads is not visible. As a remedy for this problem, we introduce a new matrix, namely the projected pseudo incidence matrix, which yields a novel decomposition of the reduced Laplacian. Then, we derive reduced order models capturing the behavior of the original structure preserved model. Next, we turn our attention to the nonlinear case where the algebraic constraints are not readily solvable. Again by the use of the projected pseudo incidence matrix, we propose explicit reduced models expressed in terms of ordinary differential equations. We identify the loads embedded in the proposed reduced network by unveiling the conserved quantity of the system

Data bases and data base systems related to NASA's aerospace program. A bibliography with indexes

This bibliography lists 1778 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system, 1975 through 1980