Millimeter-wave Wireless LAN and its Extension toward 5G Heterogeneous Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmw) frequency bands, especially 60 GHz unlicensed band, are considered as a promising solution for gigabit short range wireless communication systems. IEEE standard 802.11ad, also known as WiGig, is standardized for the usage of the 60 GHz unlicensed band for wireless local area networks (WLANs). By using this mmw WLAN, multi-Gbps rate can be achieved to support bandwidth-intensive multimedia applications. Exhaustive search along with beamforming (BF) is usually used to overcome 60 GHz channel propagation loss and accomplish data transmissions in such mmw WLANs. Because of its short range transmission with a high susceptibility to path blocking, multiple number of mmw access points (APs) should be used to fully cover a typical target environment for future high capacity multi-Gbps WLANs. Therefore, coordination among mmw APs is highly needed to overcome packet collisions resulting from un-coordinated exhaustive search BF and to increase the total capacity of mmw WLANs. In this paper, we firstly give the current status of mmw WLANs with our developed WiGig AP prototype. Then, we highlight the great need for coordinated transmissions among mmw APs as a key enabler for future high capacity mmw WLANs. Two different types of coordinated mmw WLAN architecture are introduced. One is the distributed antenna type architecture to realize centralized coordination, while the other is an autonomous coordination with the assistance of legacy Wi-Fi signaling. Moreover, two heterogeneous network (HetNet) architectures are also introduced to efficiently extend the coordinated mmw WLANs to be used for future 5th Generation (5G) cellular networks.Comment: 18 pages, 24 figures, accepted, invited paper

Spatial Domain Management and Massive MIMO Coordination in 5G SDN

In 5G mobile communication systems, massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and heterogeneous networks (HetNets) play crucial roles to achieve expected coverage and capacity across venues. This paper correspondingly addresses software-defined network (SDN) as the central controller of radio resource management in massive MIMO HetNets. In particular, we identify the huge spatial domain information management and complicated MIMO coordination as the grand challenges in 5G systems. Our work accordingly distinguishes itself by considering more network MIMO aspects, including flexibility and complexity of spatial coordination. In our proposed scheme, SDN controller first collects the user channel state information in an effective way, and then calculates the null-space of victim users and applies linear precoding to that null-space. Simulation results show that our design is highly beneficial and easy to be deployed, due to its high quality of service performance but low computation complexity

Guest Editorial Disruptive Beam-Steering Antenna Technologies for Emerging and Future Satellite Services

The papers in this special section focus on the state-of-the-art of applied and analytical research, including the latest technological advancements and the use of innovative materials and methods to disrupt the way beam-steering antennas are designed and to reveal novel approaches for the design and analysis of antennas for the next generation of satellite communication systems

Content Placement in Cache-Enabled Sub-6 GHz and Millimeter-Wave Multi-Antenna Dense Small Cell Networks

This paper studies the performance of cacheenabled dense small cell networks consisting of multi-antenna sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave (mm-wave) base stations. Different from the existing works which only consider a single antenna at each base station, the optimal content placement is unknown when the base stations have multiple antennas. We first derive the successful content delivery probability by accounting for the key channel features at sub-6 GHz and mm-wave frequencies. The maximization of the successful content delivery probability is a challenging problem. To tackle it, we first propose a constrained cross-entropy algorithm which achieves the near-optimal solution with moderate complexity. We then develop another simple yet effective heuristic probabilistic content placement scheme, termed two-stair algorithm, which strikes a balance between caching the most popular contents and achieving content diversity. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the constrained cross-entropy method and that the two-stair algorithm yields significantly better performance than only caching the most popular contents. The comparisons between the sub-6 GHz and mm-wave systems reveal an interesting tradeoff between caching capacity and density for the mm-wave system to achieve similar performance as the sub-6 GHz system

Optimization of system’s parameters for wavelength conversion of E-band signals

Current and future wireless communication systems are designed to achieve the user’s demands such as high data rate and high speed with low latency and simultaneously to save bandwidth and spectrum. In 5G and 6G networks, a high speed of transmitting and switching is required for internet of things (IoT) applications with higher capacity. To achieve these requirements a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is considered as a wavelength converter to transmit a signal with an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing with subcarrier power modulation (OFDM-SPM). It exploits the subcarrier’s power in conventional OFDM block in order to send additional bits beside the normally transmitted bits. In this paper, we optimized the SOA’s parameters to have efficient wavelength conversion process. These parameters are included the injection current (IC) of SOA, power of pump and probe signals. A 7 Gbps OFDM-SPM signal with a millimeter waves (MMW) carrier of 80 GHz is considered for signal switching. The simulation results investigated and analyzed the performance of the designed system in terms of error vector magnitude (EVM), bit error rate (BER) and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). The optimum value of IC is 0.6 A while probe power is 9.45 and 8.9 dBm for pump power. The simulation is executed by virtual photonic integrated (VPI) software