Spectrum- and Energy-Efficient Radio Resource Allocation for Wireless Communications

Wireless communications has been evolved significantly over the last decade. During this period, higher quality of service (QoS) requirements have been proposed to support various services. In addition, due to the increasing number of wireless devices and transmission, the energy consumption of the wireless networks becomes a burden. Therefore, the energy efficiency is considered as important as spectrum efficiency for future wireless communications networks, and spectrum and energy efficiency have become essential research topics in wireless communications. Moreover, due to the exploding of number mobile devices, the limited radio resources have become more and more scarce. With large numbers of users and various QoS requirements, a lot of wireless communications networks and techniques have emerged and how to effectively manage the limited radio resources become much more important. In this dissertation, we focus our research on spectrum- and energy-efficient resource allocation schemes in wireless communication networks. Recently, heterogeneous networks (HetNets) have been proposed and studied to improve the spectrum efficiency. In a two-tier heterogeneous network, small base stations reuse the same spectrum with macro base stations in order to support more transmission over the limited frequency bands. We design a cascaded precoding scheme considering both interference cancellation and power allocation for the two-tier heterogeneous network. Besides heterogeneous networks, as the fast development of intelligent transportation, we study the spectrum- and energy-efficient resource allocation in vehicular communication networks. The intelligent transportation and vehicular communications both have drawn much attention and are faced special wireless environment, which includes Doppler effects and severe uncertainties in channel estimation. A novel designed spectrum efficiency scheme is studied and verified. With consideration of energy efficiency, the device-to-device (D2D) enabled wireless network is an effective network structure to increase the usage of spectrum. From a device\u27s perspective, we design an energy-efficient resource allocation scheme in D2D communication networks. To improve the energy efficiency of wireless communication networks, energy harvesting technique is a powerful way. Recently, the simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) has been proposed as a promising energy harvesting method for wireless communication networks, based on which we derive an energy-efficient resource allocation scheme for SWIPT cooperative networks, which considers both the power and relay allocation. In addition to the schemes derivation for spectrum- and energy-efficient resource allocation, simulation results and the proofs of the proposed propositions are provided for the completeness of this dissertation

Interference mitigation in cognitive femtocell networks

“A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy”.Femtocells have been introduced as a solution to poor indoor coverage in cellular communication which has hugely attracted network operators and stakeholders. However, femtocells are designed to co-exist alongside macrocells providing improved spatial frequency reuse and higher spectrum efficiency to name a few. Therefore, when deployed in the two-tier architecture with macrocells, it is necessary to mitigate the inherent co-tier and cross-tier interference. The integration of cognitive radio (CR) in femtocells introduces the ability of femtocells to dynamically adapt to varying network conditions through learning and reasoning. This research work focuses on the exploitation of cognitive radio in femtocells to mitigate the mutual interference caused in the two-tier architecture. The research work presents original contributions in mitigating interference in femtocells by introducing practical approaches which comprises a power control scheme where femtocells adaptively controls its transmit power levels to reduce the interference it causes in a network. This is especially useful since femtocells are user deployed as this seeks to mitigate interference based on their blind placement in an indoor environment. Hybrid interference mitigation schemes which combine power control and resource/scheduling are also implemented. In a joint threshold power based admittance and contention free resource allocation scheme, the mutual interference between a Femtocell Access Point (FAP) and close-by User Equipments (UE) is mitigated based on admittance. Also, a hybrid scheme where FAPs opportunistically use Resource Blocks (RB) of Macrocell User Equipments (MUE) based on its traffic load use is also employed. Simulation analysis present improvements when these schemes are applied with emphasis in Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks especially in terms of Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR)