Multicast Scheduling and Resource Allocation Algorithms for OFDMA-Based Systems: A Survey

Multicasting is emerging as an enabling technology for multimedia transmissions over wireless networks to support several groups of users with flexible quality of service (QoS)requirements. Although multicast has huge potential to push the limits of next generation communication systems; it is however one of the most challenging issues currently being addressed. In this survey, we explain multicast group formation and various forms of group rate determination approaches. We also provide a systematic review of recent channel-aware multicast scheduling and resource allocation (MSRA) techniques proposed for downlink multicast services in OFDMA based systems. We study these enabling algorithms, evaluate their core characteristics, limitations and classify them using multidimensional matrix. We cohesively review the algorithms in terms of their throughput maximization, fairness considerations, performance complexities, multi-antenna support, optimality and simplifying assumptions. We discuss existing standards employing multicasting and further highlight some potential research opportunities in multicast systems

Datacenter Traffic Control: Understanding Techniques and Trade-offs

Datacenters provide cost-effective and flexible access to scalable compute and storage resources necessary for today's cloud computing needs. A typical datacenter is made up of thousands of servers connected with a large network and usually managed by one operator. To provide quality access to the variety of applications and services hosted on datacenters and maximize performance, it deems necessary to use datacenter networks effectively and efficiently. Datacenter traffic is often a mix of several classes with different priorities and requirements. This includes user-generated interactive traffic, traffic with deadlines, and long-running traffic. To this end, custom transport protocols and traffic management techniques have been developed to improve datacenter network performance. In this tutorial paper, we review the general architecture of datacenter networks, various topologies proposed for them, their traffic properties, general traffic control challenges in datacenters and general traffic control objectives. The purpose of this paper is to bring out the important characteristics of traffic control in datacenters and not to survey all existing solutions (as it is virtually impossible due to massive body of existing research). We hope to provide readers with a wide range of options and factors while considering a variety of traffic control mechanisms. We discuss various characteristics of datacenter traffic control including management schemes, transmission control, traffic shaping, prioritization, load balancing, multipathing, and traffic scheduling. Next, we point to several open challenges as well as new and interesting networking paradigms. At the end of this paper, we briefly review inter-datacenter networks that connect geographically dispersed datacenters which have been receiving increasing attention recently and pose interesting and novel research problems.Comment: Accepted for Publication in IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Constructive Multiuser Interference in Symbol Level Precoding for the MISO Downlink Channel

This paper investigates the problem of interference among the simultaneous multiuser transmissions in the downlink of multiple antennas systems. Using symbol level precoding, a new approach towards the multiuser interference is discussed along this paper. The concept of exploiting the interference between the spatial multiuser transmissions by jointly utilizing the data information (DI) and channel state information (CSI), in order to design symbol-level precoders, is proposed. In this direction, the interference among the data streams is transformed under certain conditions to useful signal that can improve the signal to interference noise ratio (SINR) of the downlink transmissions. We propose a maximum ratio transmission (MRT) based algorithm that jointly exploits DI and CSI to glean the benefits from constructive multiuser interference. Subsequently, a relation between the constructive interference downlink transmission and physical layer multicasting is established. In this context, novel constructive interference precoding techniques that tackle the transmit power minimization (min power) with individual SINR constraints at each user's receivers is proposed. Furthermore, fairness through maximizing the weighted minimum SINR (max min SINR) of the users is addressed by finding the link between the min power and max min SINR problems. Moreover, heuristic precoding techniques are proposed to tackle the weighted sum rate problem. Finally, extensive numerical results show that the proposed schemes outperform other state of the art techniques.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin