Interference Alignment for Cognitive Radio Communications and Networks: A Survey

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Interference alignment (IA) is an innovative wireless transmission strategy that has shown to be a promising technique for achieving optimal capacity scaling of a multiuser interference channel at asymptotically high-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Transmitters exploit the availability of multiple signaling dimensions in order to align their mutual interference at the receivers. Most of the research has focused on developing algorithms for determining alignment solutions as well as proving interference alignment’s theoretical ability to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom in a wireless network. Cognitive radio, on the other hand, is a technique used to improve the utilization of the radio spectrum by opportunistically sensing and accessing unused licensed frequency spectrum, without causing harmful interference to the licensed users. With the increased deployment of wireless services, the possibility of detecting unused frequency spectrum becomes diminished. Thus, the concept of introducing interference alignment in cognitive radio has become a very attractive proposition. This paper provides a survey of the implementation of IA in cognitive radio under the main research paradigms, along with a summary and analysis of results under each system model.Peer reviewe

Resource allocation and optimization techniques in wireless relay networks

Relay techniques have the potential to enhance capacity and coverage of a wireless network. Due to rapidly increasing number of smart phone subscribers and high demand for data intensive multimedia applications, the useful radio spectrum is becoming a scarce resource. For this reason, two way relay network and cognitive radio technologies are required for better utilization of radio spectrum. Compared to the conventional one way relay network, both the uplink and the downlink can be served simultaneously using a two way relay network. Hence the effective bandwidth efficiency is considered to be one time slot per transmission. Cognitive networks are wireless networks that consist of different types of users, a primary user (PU, the primary license holder of a spectrum band) and secondary users (SU, cognitive radios that opportunistically access the PU spectrum). The secondary users can access the spectrum of the licensed user provided they do not harmfully affect to the primary user. In this thesis, various resource allocation and optimization techniques have been investigated for wireless relay and cognitive radio networks

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

Contributions to Resource Allocation in Cognitive Radio Networks

The continuous increase in the number of wireless devices and the huge demand for higher data rates have promoted the development of new wireless communications technologies with improved spectrum sharing features. Recently, the concept of cognitive radio (CR) has gained increased popularity for the efficient utilization of radio frequency (RF) spectrum. A CR is characterized as a communication system which is capable to learn the spectrum environment through sensing, and to adapt its signaling schemes for a better utilization of the radio frequency resources. Resource allocation, which involves scheduling of spectrum and power resources, represents a crucial problem for the performance of CR networks in terms of system throughput and bandwidth utilization. In this dissertation, we investigate resource allocation problems in a CR network by exploring a variety of optimization techniques. Specifically, in the first part of the dissertation, our goal is to maximize the total throughput of secondary users (SUs) in an orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) CR network. In addition, the power of SUs is controlled to keep the interference introduced to primary users (PUs) under certain limits, which gives rise to a non-convex mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) optimization problem. It is illustrated that the original non-convex MINLP formulation admits a special structure and the optimal solution can be achieved efficiently using any standard convex optimization method under a general and practical assumption. In the second part of the dissertation, considering the imperfect sensing information, we study the joint spectrum sensing and resource allocation problem in a multi-channel-multi-user CR network. The average total throughput of SUs is maximized by jointly optimizing the sensing threshold and power allocation strategies. The problem is also formulated as a non-convex MINLP problem. By utilizing the continuous relaxation and convex optimization tools, the dimension of the non-convex MINLP problem is significantly reduced, which helps to reformulate the optimization problem without resorting to integer variables. A newly-developed optimization technique, referred to as the monotonic optimization, is then employed to obtain an optimal solution. Furthermore, a practical low-complexity spectrum sensing and resource allocation algorithm is proposed to reduce the computational cost