Mobile and Wireless Communications

Mobile and Wireless Communications have been one of the major revolutions of the late twentieth century. We are witnessing a very fast growth in these technologies where mobile and wireless communications have become so ubiquitous in our society and indispensable for our daily lives. The relentless demand for higher data rates with better quality of services to comply with state-of-the art applications has revolutionized the wireless communication field and led to the emergence of new technologies such as Bluetooth, WiFi, Wimax, Ultra wideband, OFDMA. Moreover, the market tendency confirms that this revolution is not ready to stop in the foreseen future. Mobile and wireless communications applications cover diverse areas including entertainment, industrialist, biomedical, medicine, safety and security, and others, which definitely are improving our daily life. Wireless communication network is a multidisciplinary field addressing different aspects raging from theoretical analysis, system architecture design, and hardware and software implementations. While different new applications are requiring higher data rates and better quality of service and prolonging the mobile battery life, new development and advanced research studies and systems and circuits designs are necessary to keep pace with the market requirements. This book covers the most advanced research and development topics in mobile and wireless communication networks. It is divided into two parts with a total of thirty-four stand-alone chapters covering various areas of wireless communications of special topics including: physical layer and network layer, access methods and scheduling, techniques and technologies, antenna and amplifier design, integrated circuit design, applications and systems. These chapters present advanced novel and cutting-edge results and development related to wireless communication offering the readers the opportunity to enrich their knowledge in specific topics as well as to explore the whole field of rapidly emerging mobile and wireless networks. We hope that this book will be useful for students, researchers and practitioners in their research studies

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State of the art and Research Directions

The Internet has made several giant leaps over the years, from a fixed to a mobile Internet, then to the Internet of Things, and now to a Tactile Internet. The Tactile Internet goes far beyond data, audio and video delivery over fixed and mobile networks, and even beyond allowing communication and collaboration among things. It is expected to enable haptic communication and allow skill set delivery over networks. Some examples of potential applications are tele-surgery, vehicle fleets, augmented reality and industrial process automation. Several papers already cover many of the Tactile Internet-related concepts and technologies, such as haptic codecs, applications, and supporting technologies. However, none of them offers a comprehensive survey of the Tactile Internet, including its architectures and algorithms. Furthermore, none of them provides a systematic and critical review of the existing solutions. To address these lacunae, we provide a comprehensive survey of the architectures and algorithms proposed to date for the Tactile Internet. In addition, we critically review them using a well-defined set of requirements and discuss some of the lessons learned as well as the most promising research directions

Packet scheduling in satellite LTE networks employing MIMO technology.

Doctor of Philosophy in Electronic Engineering. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2014.Rapid growth in the number of mobile users and ongoing demand for different types of telecommunication services from mobile networks, have driven the need for new technologies that provide high data rates and satisfy their respective Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, irrespective of their location. The satellite component will play a vital role in these new technologies, since the terrestrial component is not able to provide global coverage due to economic and technical limitations. This has led to the emergence of Satellite Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks which employ Multiple-In Multiple-Out (MIMO) technology. In order to achieve the set QoS targets, required data rates and fairness among various users with different traffic demands in the satellite LTE network, it is crucial to design an effective scheduling and a sub-channel allocation scheme that will provide an optimal balance of all these requirements. It is against this background that this study investigates packet scheduling in satellite LTE networks employing MIMO technology. One of the main foci of this study is to propose new cross-layer based packet scheduling schemes, tagged Queue Aware Fair (QAF) and Channel Based Queue Sensitive (CBQS) scheduling schemes. The proposed schemes are designed to improve both fairness and network throughput without compromising users’ QoS demands, as they provide a good trade-off between throughput, QoS demands and fairness. They also improve the performance of the network in comparison with other scheduling schemes. The comparison is determined through simulations. Due to the fact that recent schedulers provide a trade-off among major performance indices, a new performance index to evaluate the overall performance of each scheduler is derived. This index is tagged the Scheduling Performance Metric (SPM). The study also investigates the impact of the long propagation delay and different effective isotropic radiated powers on the performance of the satellite LTE network. The results show that both have a significant impact on network performance. In order to actualize an optimal scheduling scheme for the satellite LTE network, the scheduling problem is formulated as an optimization function and an optimal solution is obtained using Karush-Kuhn-Tucker multipliers. The obtained Near Optimal Scheduling Scheme (NOSS), whose aim is to maximize the network throughput without compromising users’ QoS demands and fairness, provides better throughput and spectral efficiency performance than other schedulers. The comparison is determined through simulations. Based on the new SPM, the proposed NOSS1 and NOSS2 outperform other schedulers. A stability analysis is also presented to determine whether or not the proposed scheduler will provide a stable network. A fluid limit technique is used for the stability analysis. Finally, a sub-channel allocation scheme is proposed, with the aim of providing a better sub-channel or Physical Resource Block (PRB) allocation method, tagged the Utility Auction Based (UAB) subchannel allocation scheme that will improve the system performance of the satellite LTE network. The results show that the proposed method performs better than the other scheme. The comparison is obtained through simulations

Opportunistic device-to-device communication in cellular networks: from theory to practice

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorCellular service providers have been struggling with users’ demand since the emergence of mobile Internet. As a result, each generation of cellular network prevailed over its predecessors mainly in terms of connection speed. However, the fifth generation (5G) of cellular network promises to go beyond this trend by revolutionizing the network architecture. Device-to-Device (D2D) communication is one of the revolutionary changes that enables mobile users to communicate directly without traversing a base station. This feature is being actively studied in 3GPP with special focus on public safety as it allows mobiles to operate in adhoc mode. Although under the (partial) control of the network, D2D communications open the door to many other use-cases. This dissertation studies different aspects of D2D communications and its impact on the key performance indicators of the network. We design an architecture for the collaboration of cellular users by means of timely exploited D2D opportunities. We begin by presenting the analytical study on opportunistic outband D2D communications. The study reveals the great potential of opportunistic outband D2D communications for enhancing energy efficiency, fairness, and capacity of cellular networks when groups of D2D users can be form and managed in the cellular network. Then we introduce a protocol that is compatible with the latest release of IEEE and 3GPP standards and allows for implementation of our proposal in a today’s cellular network. To validate our analytical findings, we use our experimental Software Defined Radio (SDR)-based testbed to further study our proposal in a real world scenario. The experimental results confirm the outstanding potential of opportunistic outband D2D communications. Finally, we investigate the performance merits and disadvantages of different D2D “modes”. Our investigation reveals, despite the common belief, that all D2D modes are complementary and their merits are scenario based.This work has been supported by IMDEA Networks Institute.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Douglas Leith.- Secretario: Albert Banchs Roca.- Vocal: Carla Fabiana Chiasserin

Radio network management in cognitive LTE-Femtocell Systems

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.There is a strong uptake of femtocell deployment as small cell application platforms in the upcoming LTE networks. In such two-tier networks of LTEfemtocell base stations, a large portion of the assigned spectrum is used sporadically leading to underutilisation of valuable frequency resources. Novel spectrum access techniques are necessary to solve these current spectrum inefficiency problems. Therefore, spectrum management solutions should have the features to improve spectrum access in both temporal and spatial manner. Cognitive Radio (CR) with the Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) is considered to be the key technology in this research in order to increase the spectrum efficiency. This is an effective solution to allow a group of Secondary Users (SUs) to share the radio spectrum initially allocated to the Primary User (PUs) at no interference. The core aim of this thesis is to develop new cognitive LTE-femtocell systems that offer a 4G vision, to facilitate the radio network management in order to increase the network capacity and further improve spectrum access probabilities. In this thesis, a new spectrum management model for cognitive radio networks is considered to enable a seamless integration of multi-access technology with existing networks. This involves the design of efficient resource allocation algorithms that are able to respond to the rapid changes in the dynamic wireless environment and primary users activities. Throughout this thesis a variety of network upgraded functions are developed using application simulation scenarios. Therefore, the proposed algorithms, mechanisms, methods, and system models are not restricted in the considered networks, but rather have a wider applicability to be used in other technologies. This thesis mainly investigates three aspects of research issues relating to the efficient management of cognitive networks: First, novel spectrum resource management modules are proposed to maximise the spectrum access by rapidly detecting the available transmission opportunities. Secondly, a developed pilot power controlling algorithm is introduced to minimise the power consumption by considering mobile position and application requirements. Also, there is investigation on the impact of deploying different numbers of femtocell base stations in LTE domain to identify the optimum cell size for future networks. Finally, a novel call admission control mechanism for mobility management is proposed to support seamless handover between LTE and femtocell domains. This is performed by assigning high speed mobile users to the LTE system to avoid unnecessary handovers. The proposed solutions were examined by simulation and numerical analysis to show the strength of cognitive femtocell deployment for the required applications. The results show that the new system design based on cognitive radio configuration enable an efficient resource management in terms of spectrum allocation, adaptive pilot power control, and mobile handover. The proposed framework and algorithms offer a novel spectrum management for self organised LTE-femtocell architecture. Eventually, this research shows that certain architectures fulfilling spectrum management requirements are implementable in practice and display good performance in dynamic wireless environments which recommends the consideration of CR systems in LTE and femtocell networks

Delay QoS Provisioning and Optimal Resource Allocation for Wireless Networks

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth in wireless communication and networking due to the exponential growth in mobile applications and smart devices, fueling unprecedented increase in both mobile data traffic and energy demand. Among such data traffic, real-time data transmissions in wireless systems require certain quality of service (QoS) constraints e.g., in terms of delay, buffer overflow or packet drop/loss probabilities, so that acceptable performance levels can be guaranteed for the end-users, especially in delay sensitive scenarios, such as live video transmission, interactive video (e.g., teleconferencing), and mobile online gaming. With this motivation, statistical queuing constraints are considered in this thesis, imposed as limitations on the decay rate of buffer overflow probabilities. In particular, the throughput and energy efficiency of different types of wireless network models are analyzed under QoS constraints, and optimal resource allocation algorithms are proposed to maximize the throughput or minimize the delay. In the first part of the thesis, the throughput and energy efficiency analysis for hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols are conducted under QoS constraints. Approximations are employed for small QoS exponent values in order to obtain closed-form expressions for the throughput and energy efficiency metrics. Also, the impact of random arrivals, deadline constraints, outage probability and QoS constraints are studied. For the same system setting, the throughput of HARQ system is also analyzed using a recurrence approach, which provides more accurate results for any value of the QoS exponent. Similarly, random arrival models and deadline constraints are considered, and these results are further extended to the finite-blocklength coding regime. Next, cooperative relay networks are considered under QoS constraints. Specifically, the throughput performance in the two-hop relay channel, two-way relay channel, and multi-source multi-destination relay networks is analyzed. Finite-blocklength codes are considered for the two-hop relay channel, and optimization over the error probabilities is investigated. For the multi-source multi-destination relay network model, the throughput for both cases of with and without CSI at the transmitter sides is studied. When there is perfect CSI at the transmitter, transmission rates can be varied according to instantaneous channel conditions. When CSI is not available at the transmitter side, transmissions are performed at fixed rates, and decoding failures lead to retransmission requests via an ARQ protocol. Following the analysis of cooperative networks, the performance of both half-duplex and full-duplex operations is studied for the two-way multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system under QoS constraints. In full-duplex mode, the self-interference inflicted on the reception of a user due to simultaneous transmissions from the same user is taken into account. In this setting, the system throughput is formulated by considering the sum of the effective capacities of the users in both half-duplex and full-duplex modes. The low signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime is considered and the optimal transmission/power-allocation strategies are characterized by identifying the optimal input covariance matrices. Next, mode selection and resource allocation for device-to-device (D2D) cellular networks are studied. As the starting point, ransmission mode selection and resource allocation are analyzed for a time-division multiplexed (TDM) cellular network with one cellular user, one base station, and a pair of D2D users under rate and QoS constraints. For a more complicated setting with multiple cellular and D2D users, two joint mode selection and resource allocation algorithms are proposed. In the first algorithm, the channel allocation problem is formulated as a maximum-weight matching problem, which can be solved by employing the Hungarian algorithm. In the second algorithm, the problem is divided into three subproblems, namely user partition, power allocation and channel assignment, and a novel three-step method is proposed by combining the algorithms designed for the three subproblems. In the final part of the thesis, resource allocation algorithms are investigated for content delivery over wireless networks. Three different systems are considered. Initially, a caching algorithm is designed, which minimizes the average delay of a single-cell network. The proposed algorithm is applicable in settings with very general popularity models, with no assumptions on how file popularity varies among different users, and this algorithm is further extended to a more general setting, in which the system parameters and the distributions of channel fading change over time. Next, for D2D cellular networks operating under deadline constraints, a scheduling algorithm is designed, which manages mode selection, channel allocation and power maximization with acceptable complexity. This proposed scheduling algorithm is designed based on the convex delay cost method for a D2D cellular network with deadline constraints in an OFDMA setting. Power optimization algorithms are proposed for all possible modes, based on our utility definition. Finally, a two-step intercell interference (ICI)-aware scheduling algorithm is proposed for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), which performs user grouping and resource allocation with the goal of minimizing delay violation probability. A novel user grouping algorithm is developed for the user grouping step, which controls the interference among the users in the same group, and the channel assignment problem is formulated as a maximum-weight matching problem in the second step, which can be solved using standard algorithms in graph theory