Matching Theory Framework for 5G Wireless Communications

The prevalence of high-performance mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets has brought fundamental changes to the existing wireless networks. The growth of multimedia and location-based mobile services has exponentially increased the network congestion and the demands for more wireless resources. The extremely high computational complexity and communication overhead resulting from the conventional centralized resource management methods are no longer suitable to capture the scale of tomorrow’s wireless networks. As a result, the resource management in next-generation networks is shifting from the centralized optimization to the self-organizing solutions. The goal of this thesis is to demonstrate the effectiveness of matching theory, a powerful operational research framework, for solving the wireless resource allocation problems in a distributed manner. Matching theory, as a Nobel-prize winning framework, has already been widely used in many economic fields. More recently, matching theory has been shown to have a promising potential for modeling and analyzing wireless resource allocation problems due to three reasons: (1) it offers suitable models that can inherently capture various wireless communication features; (2) the ability to use notions, such as preference relations, that can interpret complex system requirements; (3) it provides low-complexity and near-optimal matching algorithms while guaranteeing the system stability. This dissertation provides a theoretical research of implementing the matching theory into the wireless communication fields. The main contributions of this dissertation are summarized as follows. An overview of the basic concepts, classifications, and models of the matching theory is provided. Furthermore, comparisons with existing mathematical solutions for the resource allocation problems in the wireless networks are conducted. Applications of matching theory in the wireless communications are studied. Especially, the stable marriage model, the student project allocation model and so on are introduced and applied to solve the resource allocation problems, such as the device-to-device (D2D) communication, LTE-Unlicensed, and so on. Both theoretical and numerical analysis are provided to show that matching theory can model complex system requirements, and also provide semi-distributive matching algorithms to achieve stable and close-optimal results. The potential and challenges of the matching theory for designing resource allocation mechanisms in the future wireless networks are discussed.Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department o

Advanced Technologies Enabling the Efficient and Fair Coexistence Between LTE-U Systems andWiFi Networks

Deploying LTE in the unlicensed spectrum (LTE-U) is regarded as one of the most promising solutions to face significant data demand in the near future. According to regional regulations to access the unlicensed spectrums, LTE-U can be divided into two types: with listen-before-talk (LBT) and without LBT. The former type is regarded as the most promising global solution for LTE-U networks coexisting with WiFi networks and is a key feature in the Release 13 of 3GPP, denoted as licensed-assisted access (LAA). While, the latter employs a duty cycle-based access scheme, which requires fewer modifications on the LTE side, enabling it to be deployed in the short term. The coexistence and performance optimization between LTE-U and Wi-Fi is the major scope of this thesis. In Chapter 3, the performance of LAA coexisting withWiFi is explored. The first major contribution is the more precise and comprehensive Markov Chain models developed to model the performance of baseline LBT and distributed coordinated function (DCF), which overcomes the limitations of current Markov Chain models. The second contribution is the contention window (CW) size based optimization scheme to maximize the LAA system throughput while guaranteeing minimum WiFi throughput. The third contribution is the reinforcement learning-based algorithm developed to optimize the initial CWsize according to the environment, e.g., the number of cellular users, the traffic demand of WiFi users, etc. In Chapter 4 RRM between LTE-U without the LBT scheme, i.e., duty cycle based scheme, and WiFi networks is studied. We are the first to formulate the RRM problem as a many-to-one matching with incomplete preference lists. The major contribution is the 2- step matching-based algorithm proposed to obtain Pareto efficient energy efficiency of each CU in a computational complexity efficient manner. In Chapter 5, the context is extended: CU can be allocated either an unlicensed band or licensed band while WUs are allocated unlicensed bands. The major contribution is the matching-based algorithm, which is extended to integration of many-to-one and one-to-one matching to optimize the utility of each CU while guaranteeing minimum throughput of each CU and WU under various pricing strategies

Energy efficient and fair resource allocation for LTE-unlicensed uplink networks: A two-sided matching approach with partial information

Long‐Term Evolution–unlicensed (LTE‐U) has recently attracted worldwide interest to meet the explosion in cellular traffic data. By using carrier aggregation, licensed and unlicensed bands are integrated to enhance transmission capacity while maintaining reliable and predictable performance. As there may exist other conventional unlicensed band users, such as WiFi users, LTE‐U users have to share the same unlicensed bands with them. Thus, an optimized resource allocation scheme to ensure the fairness between LTE‐U users and conventional unlicensed band users is critical for the deployment of LTE‐U networks. In this paper, we investigate an energy efficient resource allocation problem in LTE‐U coexisting with other wireless networks, which aims at guaranteeing fairness among the users of different radio access networks. We formulate the problem as a multiobjective optimization problem and propose a semidistributed matching framework with a partial information‐based algorithm to solve it. We demonstrate our contributions with simulations in which various network densities and traffic load levels are considered

Energy and throughput efficient strategies for heterogeneous future communication networks

As a result of the proliferation of wireless-enabled user equipment and data-hungry applications, mobile data traffic has exponentially increased in recent years.This in-crease has not only forced mobile networks to compete on the scarce wireless spectrum but also to intensify their power consumption to serve an ever-increasing number of user devices. The Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) concept, where mixed types of low-power base stations coexist with large macro base stations, has emerged as a potential solution to address power consumption and spectrum scarcity challenges. However, as a consequence of their inflexible, constrained, and hardware-based configurations, HetNets have major limitations in adapting to fluctuating traffic patterns. Moreover, for large mobile networks, the number of low-power base stations (BSs) may increase dramatically leading to sever power consumption. This can easily overwhelm the benefits of the HetNet concept. This thesis exploits the adaptive nature of Software-defined Radio (SDR) technology to design novel and optimal communication strategies. These strategies have been designed to leverage the spectrum-based cell zooming technique, the long-term evolution licensed assisted access (LTE-LAA) concept, and green energy, in order to introduce a novel communication framework that endeavors to minimize overall network on-grid power consumption and to maximize aggregated throughput, which brings significant benefits for both network operators and their customers. The proposed strategies take into consideration user data demands, BS loads, BS power consumption, and available spectrum to model the research questions as optimization problems. In addition, this thesis leverages the opportunistic nature of the cognitive radio (CR) technique and the adaptive nature of the SDR to introduce a CR-based communication strategy. This proposed CR-based strategy alleviates the power consumption of the CR technique and enhances its security measures according to the confidentiality level of the data being sent. Furthermore, the introduced strategy takes into account user-related factors, such as user battery levels and user data types, and network-related factors, such as the number of unutilized bands and vulnerability level, and then models the research question as a constrained optimization problem. Considering the time complexity of the optimum solutions for the above-mentioned strategies, heuristic solutions were proposed and examined against existing solutions. The obtained results show that the proposed strategies can save energy consumption up to 18%, increase user throughput up to 23%, and achieve better spectrum utilization. Therefore, the proposed strategies offer substantial benefits for both network operators and users

Spectrum Sharing, Latency, and Security in 5G Networks with Application to IoT and Smart Grid

The surge of mobile devices, such as smartphones, and tables, demands additional capacity. On the other hand, Internet-of-Things (IoT) and smart grid, which connects numerous sensors, devices, and machines require ubiquitous connectivity and data security. Additionally, some use cases, such as automated manufacturing process, automated transportation, and smart grid, require latency as low as 1 ms, and reliability as high as 99.99\%. To enhance throughput and support massive connectivity, sharing of the unlicensed spectrum (3.5 GHz, 5GHz, and mmWave) is a potential solution. On the other hand, to address the latency, drastic changes in the network architecture is required. The fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will embrace the spectrum sharing and network architecture modifications to address the throughput enhancement, massive connectivity, and low latency. To utilize the unlicensed spectrum, we propose a fixed duty cycle based coexistence of LTE and WiFi, in which the duty cycle of LTE transmission can be adjusted based on the amount of data. In the second approach, a multi-arm bandit learning based coexistence of LTE and WiFi has been developed. The duty cycle of transmission and downlink power are adapted through the exploration and exploitation. This approach improves the aggregated capacity by 33\%, along with cell edge and energy efficiency enhancement. We also investigate the performance of LTE and ZigBee coexistence using smart grid as a scenario. In case of low latency, we summarize the existing works into three domains in the context of 5G networks: core, radio and caching networks. Along with this, fundamental constraints for achieving low latency are identified followed by a general overview of exemplary 5G networks. Besides that, a loop-free, low latency and local-decision based routing protocol is derived in the context of smart grid. This approach ensures low latency and reliable data communication for stationary devices. To address data security in wireless communication, we introduce a geo-location based data encryption, along with node authentication by k-nearest neighbor algorithm. In the second approach, node authentication by the support vector machine, along with public-private key management, is proposed. Both approaches ensure data security without increasing the packet overhead compared to the existing approaches