Energy sharing and trading in multi-operator heterogeneous network deployments

© 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.With a view to the expected increased data traffic volume and energy consumption of the fifth generation networks, the use of renewable energy (RE) sources and infrastructure sharing have been embraced as energy and cost-saving technologies. Aiming at reducing cost and grid energy consumption, in the present paper, we study RE exchange (REE) possibilities in late-trend network deployments of energy harvesting (EH) macrocell and small cell base stations (EH-MBSs, EH-SBSs) that use an EH system, an energy storage system, and the smart grid as energy procurement sources. On this basis, we study a two-tier network composed of EH-MBSs that are passively shared among a set of mobile network operators (MNOs), and EH-SBSs that are provided to MNOs by an infrastructure provider (InP). Taking into consideration the infrastructure location and the variety of stakeholders involved in the network deployment, we propose as REE approaches 1) a cooperative RE sharing, based on bankruptcy theory, for the shared EH-MBSs and 2) a non-cooperative, aggregator-assisted RE trading, which uses double auctions to describe the REE acts among the InP provided EH-SBSs managed by different MNOs, after an initial internal REE among the ones managed by a single MNO. Our results display that our proposals outperform baseline approaches, providing a considerable reduction in SG energy utilization and costs, with satisfaction of the participant parties.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Open-Source Telemedicine Platform for Wireless Medical Video Communication

An m-health system for real-time wireless communication of medical video based on open-source software is presented. The objective is to deliver a low-cost telemedicine platform which will allow for reliable remote diagnosis m-health applications such as emergency incidents, mass population screening, and medical education purposes. The performance of the proposed system is demonstrated using five atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound videos. The videos are encoded at the clinically acquired resolution, in addition to lower, QCIF, and CIF resolutions, at different bitrates, and four different encoding structures. Commercially available wireless local area network (WLAN) and 3.5G high-speed packet access (HSPA) wireless channels are used to validate the developed platform. Objective video quality assessment is based on PSNR ratings, following calibration using the variable frame delay (VFD) algorithm that removes temporal mismatch between original and received videos. Clinical evaluation is based on atherosclerotic plaque ultrasound video assessment protocol. Experimental results show that adequate diagnostic quality wireless medical video communications are realized using the designed telemedicine platform. HSPA cellular networks provide for ultrasound video transmission at the acquired resolution, while VFD algorithm utilization bridges objective and subjective ratings

Approaches for Future Internet architecture design and Quality of Experience (QoE) Control

Researching a Future Internet capable of overcoming the current Internet limitations is a strategic investment. In this respect, this paper presents some concepts that can contribute to provide some guidelines to overcome the above-mentioned limitations. In the authors' vision, a key Future Internet target is to allow applications to transparently, efficiently and flexibly exploit the available network resources with the aim to match the users' expectations. Such expectations could be expressed in terms of a properly defined Quality of Experience (QoE). In this respect, this paper provides some approaches for coping with the QoE provision problem