MEC-aware Cell Association for 5G Heterogeneous Networks

The need for efficient use of network resources is continuously increasing with the grow of traffic demand, however, current mobile systems have been planned and deployed so far with the mere aim of enhancing radio coverage and capacity. Unfortunately, this approach is not sustainable anymore, as 5G communication systems will have to cope with huge amounts of traffic, heterogeneous in terms of latency among other Qualityof- Service (QoS) requirements. Moreover, the advent of Multiaccess Edge Computing (MEC) brings up the need to more efficiently plan and dimension network deployment by means of jointly exploiting the available radio and processing resources. From this standpoint, advanced cell association of users can play a key role for 5G systems. Focusing on a Heterogeneous Network (HetNet), this paper proposes a comparison between state-of-the-art (i.e., radio-only) and MEC-aware cell association rules, taking the scenario of task offloading in the Uplink (UL) as an example. Numerical evaluations show that the proposed cell association rule provides nearly 60% latency reduction, as compared to its standard, radio-exclusive counterpart.Comment: 2018 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference Workshops (WCNCW): The First Workshop on Control and management of Vertical slicing including the Edge and Fog Systems (COMPASS

Multi-Channel Access Solutions for 5G New Radio

5G New Radio paves the way for introducing novel multi-service radio resource management solutions tailored for enhanced Mobile Broadband and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication service classes. Multi-Channel Access is a family of such multi-service solutions that enable a user equipment to aggregate radio resources from multiple sources. The objective is multi-fold; throughput enhancement through access to a larger bandwidth, reliability improvement by increasing the diversity order and/or coordinated transmission/reception, as well as flexibility and load balancing improvement by decoupling the downlink and the uplink access points. This paper presents several multi-channel access solutions for 5G New Radio multi-service scenarios. In particular, throughput enhancement and latency reduction concepts like multi-connectivity, carrier aggregation, downlink-uplink decoupled access and coordinated multi-point connectivity are discussed. Moreover, novel design solutions exploiting these concepts are proposed. Numerical evaluation of the introduced solutions indicates significant performance gains over state-of-the-art schemes; for example, our proposed component carrier selection mechanism leads to a median throughput gain of up to 100% by means of an implicit load balance. Therefore, the proposed Multi-Channel Access solutions have the potential to be key multi-service enablers for 5G New Radio.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of IEEE WCNC 2019 Workshop

Decentralized Computation Offloading and Resource Allocation in Heterogeneous Networks with Mobile Edge Computing

We consider a heterogeneous network with mobile edge computing, where a user can offload its computation to one among multiple servers. In particular, we minimize the system-wide computation overhead by jointly optimizing the individual computation decisions, transmit power of the users, and computation resource at the servers. The crux of the problem lies in the combinatorial nature of multi-user offloading decisions, the complexity of the optimization objective, and the existence of inter-cell interference. Then, we decompose the underlying problem into two subproblems: i) the offloading decision, which includes two phases of user association and subchannel assignment, and ii) joint resource allocation, which can be further decomposed into the problems of transmit power and computation resource allocation. To enable distributed computation offloading, we sequentially apply a many-to-one matching game for user association and a one-to-one matching game for subchannel assignment. Moreover, the transmit power of offloading users is found using a bisection method with approximate inter-cell interference, and the computation resources allocated to offloading users is achieved via the duality approach. The proposed algorithm is shown to converge and is stable. Finally, we provide simulations to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm as well as comparisons with the existing frameworks.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Journa