Interference Management in 5G Reverse TDD HetNets with Wireless Backhaul: A Large System Analysis

This work analyzes a heterogeneous network (HetNet), which comprises a macro base station (BS) equipped with a large number of antennas and an overlaid dense tier of small cell access points (SCAs) using a wireless backhaul for data traffic. The static and low mobility user equipment terminals (UEs) are associated with the SCAs while those with medium-to-high mobility are served by the macro BS. A reverse time division duplexing (TDD) protocol is used by the two tiers, which allows the BS to locally estimate both the intra-tier and inter-tier channels. This knowledge is then used at the BS either in the uplink (UL) or in the downlink (DL) to simultaneously serve the macro UEs (MUEs) and to provide the wireless backhaul to SCAs. A geographical separation of co-channel SCAs is proposed to limit the interference coming from the UL signals of MUEs. A concatenated linear precoding technique employing either zero-forcing (ZF) or regularized ZF is used at the BS to simultaneously serve MUEs and SCAs in DL while nulling interference toward those SCAs in UL. We evaluate and characterize the performance of the system through the power consumption of UL and DL transmissions under the assumption that target rates must be satisfied and imperfect channel state information is available for MUEs. The analysis is conducted in the asymptotic regime where the number of BS antennas and the network size (MUEs and SCAs) grow large with fixed ratios. Results from large system analysis are used to provide concise formulae for the asymptotic UL and DL transmit powers and precoding vectors under the above assumptions. Numerical results are used to validate the analysis in different settings and to make comparisons with alternative network architectures.Comment: 14 pages, 12 figures. To appear IEEE J. Select. Areas Commun. -- Special Issue on HetNet

Quality-Aware Broadcasting Strategies for Position Estimation in VANETs

The dissemination of vehicle position data all over the network is a fundamental task in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) operations, as applications often need to know the position of other vehicles over a large area. In such cases, inter-vehicular communications should be exploited to satisfy application requirements, although congestion control mechanisms are required to minimize the packet collision probability. In this work, we face the issue of achieving accurate vehicle position estimation and prediction in a VANET scenario. State of the art solutions to the problem try to broadcast the positioning information periodically, so that vehicles can ensure that the information their neighbors have about them is never older than the inter-transmission period. However, the rate of decay of the information is not deterministic in complex urban scenarios: the movements and maneuvers of vehicles can often be erratic and unpredictable, making old positioning information inaccurate or downright misleading. To address this problem, we propose to use the Quality of Information (QoI) as the decision factor for broadcasting. We implement a threshold-based strategy to distribute position information whenever the positioning error passes a reference value, thereby shifting the objective of the network to limiting the actual positioning error and guaranteeing quality across the VANET. The threshold-based strategy can reduce the network load by avoiding the transmission of redundant messages, as well as improving the overall positioning accuracy by more than 20% in realistic urban scenarios.Comment: 8 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables, accepted for presentation at European Wireless 201

Cognitive Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks over Nakagami-m Fading Channels

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under Grant 61372114, by the National 973 Program of China under Grant 2012CB316005, by the Joint Funds of NSFC-Guangdong under Grant U1035001, and by Beijing Higher Education Young Elite Teacher Project (no. YETP0434)

Performance evaluation of non-prefiltering vs. time reversal prefiltering in distributed and uncoordinated IR-UWB ad-hoc networks

Time Reversal (TR) is a prefiltering scheme mostly analyzed in the context of centralized and synchronous IR-UWB networks, in order to leverage the trade-off between communication performance and device complexity, in particular in presence of multiuser interference. Several strong assumptions have been typically adopted in the analysis of TR, such as the absence of Inter-Symbol / Inter-Frame Interference (ISI/IFI) and multipath dispersion due to complex signal propagation. This work has the main goal of comparing the performance of TR-based systems with traditional non-prefiltered schemes, in the novel context of a distributed and uncoordinated IR-UWB network, under more realistic assumptions including the presence of ISI/IFI and multipath dispersion. Results show that, lack of power control and imperfect channel knowledge affect the performance of both non-prefiltered and TR systems; in these conditions, TR prefiltering still guarantees a performance improvement in sparse/low-loaded and overloaded network scenarios, while the opposite is true for less extreme scenarios, calling for the developement of an adaptive scheme that enables/disables TR prefiltering depending on network conditions

Spectrum Sharing in Wireless Networks via QoS-Aware Secondary Multicast Beamforming

Secondary spectrum usage has the potential to considerably increase spectrum utilization. In this paper, quality-of-service (QoS)-aware spectrum underlay of a secondary multicast network is considered. A multiantenna secondary access point (AP) is used for multicast (common information) transmission to a number of secondary single-antenna receivers. The idea is that beamforming can be used to steer power towards the secondary receivers while limiting sidelobes that cause interference to primary receivers. Various optimal formulations of beamforming are proposed, motivated by different ldquocohabitationrdquo scenarios, including robust designs that are applicable with inaccurate or limited channel state information at the secondary AP. These formulations are NP-hard computational problems; yet it is shown how convex approximation-based multicast beamforming tools (originally developed without regard to primary interference constraints) can be adapted to work in a spectrum underlay context. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches and provide insights on the tradeoffs between different design criteria