Role of Interference and Computational Complexity in Modern Wireless Networks: Analysis, Optimization, and Design

Owing to the popularity of smartphones, the recent widespread adoption of wireless broadband has resulted in a tremendous growth in the volume of mobile data traffic, and this growth is projected to continue unabated. In order to meet the needs of future systems, several novel technologies have been proposed, including cooperative communications, cloud radio access networks (RANs) and very densely deployed small-cell networks. For these novel networks, both interference and the limited availability of computational resources play a very important role. Therefore, the accurate modeling and analysis of interference and computation is essential to the understanding of these networks, and an enabler for more efficient design.;This dissertation focuses on four aspects of modern wireless networks: (1) Modeling and analysis of interference in single-hop wireless networks, (2) Characterizing the tradeoffs between the communication performance of wireless transmission and the computational load on the systems used to process such transmissions, (3) The optimization of wireless multiple-access networks when using cost functions that are based on the analytical findings in this dissertation, and (4) The analysis and optimization of multi-hop networks, which may optionally employ forms of cooperative communication.;The study of interference in single-hop wireless networks proceeds by assuming that the random locations of the interferers are drawn from a point process and possibly constrained to a finite area. Both the information-bearing and interfering signals propagate over channels that are subject to path loss, shadowing, and fading. A flexible model for fading, based on the Nakagami distribution, is used, though specific examples are provided for Rayleigh fading. The analysis is broken down into multiple steps, involving subsequent averaging of the performance metrics over the fading, the shadowing, and the location of the interferers with the aim to distinguish the effect of these mechanisms that operate over different time scales. The analysis is extended to accommodate diversity reception, which is important for the understanding of cooperative systems that combine transmissions that originate from different locations. Furthermore, the role of spatial correlation is considered, which provides insight into how the performance in one location is related to the performance in another location.;While it is now generally understood how to communicate close to the fundamental limits implied by information theory, operating close to the fundamental performance bounds is costly in terms of the computational complexity required to receive the signal. This dissertation provides a framework for understanding the tradeoffs between communication performance and the imposed complexity based on how close a system operates to the performance bounds, and it allows to accurately estimate the required data processing resources of a network under a given performance constraint. The framework is applied to Cloud-RAN, which is a new cellular architecture that moves the bulk of the signal processing away from the base stations (BSs) and towards a centralized computing cloud. The analysis developed in this part of the dissertation helps to illuminate the benefits of pooling computing assets when decoding multiple uplink signals in the cloud. Building upon these results, new approaches for wireless resource allocation are proposed, which unlike previous approaches, are aware of the computing limitations of the network.;By leveraging the accurate expressions that characterize performance in the presence of interference and fading, a methodology is described for optimizing wireless multiple-access networks. The focus is on frequency hopping (FH) systems, which are already widely used in military systems, and are becoming more common in commercial systems. The optimization determines the best combination of modulation parameters (such as the modulation index for continuous-phase frequency-shift keying), number of hopping channels, and code rate. In addition, it accounts for the adjacent-channel interference (ACI) and determines how much of the signal spectrum should lie within the operating band of each channel, and how much can be allowed to splatter into adjacent channels.;The last part of this dissertation contemplates networks that involve multi-hop communications. Building on the analytical framework developed in early parts of this dissertation, the performance of such networks is analyzed in the presence of interference and fading, and it is introduced a novel paradigm for a rapid performance assessment of routing protocols. Such networks may involve cooperative communications, and the particular cooperative protocol studied here allows the same packet to be transmitted simultaneously by multiple transmitters and diversity combined at the receiver. The dynamics of how the cooperative protocol evolves over time is described through an absorbing Markov chain, and the analysis is able to efficiently capture the interference that arises as packets are periodically injected into the network by a common source, the temporal correlation among these packets and their interdependence

Full-Duplex Cloud Radio Access Network: Stochastic Design and Analysis

Full-duplex (FD) has emerged as a disruptive communications paradigm for enhancing the achievable spectral efficiency (SE), thanks to the recent major breakthroughs in self-interference (SI) mitigation. The FD versus half-duplex (HD) SE gain, in cellular networks, is however largely limited by the mutual-interference (MI) between the downlink (DL) and the uplink (UL). A potential remedy for tackling the MI bottleneck is through cooperative communications. This paper provides a stochastic design and analysis of FD enabled cloud radio access network (C-RAN) under the Poisson point process (PPP)-based abstraction model of multi-antenna radio units (RUs) and user equipments (UEs). We consider different disjoint and user-centric approaches towards the formation of finite clusters in the C-RAN. Contrary to most existing studies, we explicitly take into consideration non-isotropic fading channel conditions and finite-capacity fronthaul links. Accordingly, upper-bound expressions for the C-RAN DL and UL SEs, involving the statistics of all intended and interfering signals, are derived. The performance of the FD C-RAN is investigated through the proposed theoretical framework and Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations. The results indicate that significant FD versus HD C-RAN SE gains can be achieved, particularly in the presence of sufficient-capacity fronthaul links and advanced interference cancellation capabilities

Connectivity analysis in clustered wireless sensor networks powered by solar energy

©2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Emerging 5G communication paradigms, such as machine-type communication, have triggered an explosion in ad-hoc applications that require connectivity among the nodes of wireless networks. Ensuring a reliable network operation under fading conditions is not straightforward, as the transmission schemes and the network topology, i.e., uniform or clustered deployments, affect the performance and should be taken into account. Moreover, as the number of nodes increases, exploiting natural energy sources and wireless energy harvesting (WEH) could be the key to the elimination of maintenance costs while also boosting immensely the network lifetime. In this way, zero-energy wireless-powered sensor networks (WPSNs) could be achieved, if all components are powered by green sources. Hence, designing accurate mathematical models that capture the network behavior under these circumstances is necessary to provide a deeper comprehension of such networks. In this paper, we provide an analytical model for the connectivity in a large-scale zero-energy clustered WPSN under two common transmission schemes, namely, unicast and broadcast. The sensors are WEH-enabled, while the network components are solar-powered and employ a novel energy allocation algorithm. In our results, we evaluate the tradeoffs among the various scenarios via extensive simulations and identify the conditions that yield a fully connected zero-energy WPSN.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis of Single- and Multi-Cluster Wireless Networks

This paper develops a stochastic geometry-based approach for the modeling and analysis of single- and multi-cluster wireless networks. We first define finite homogeneous Poisson point processes to model the number and locations of the transmitters in a confined region as a single-cluster wireless network. We study the coverage probability for a reference receiver for two strategies; closest-selection, where the receiver is served by the closest transmitter among all transmitters, and uniform-selection, where the serving transmitter is selected randomly with uniform distribution. Second, using Matern cluster processes, we extend our model and analysis to multi-cluster wireless networks. Here, the receivers are modeled in two types, namely, closed- and open-access. Closed-access receivers are distributed around the cluster centers of the transmitters according to a symmetric normal distribution and can be served only by the transmitters of their corresponding clusters. Open-access receivers, on the other hand, are placed independently of the transmitters and can be served by all transmitters. In all cases, the link distance distribution and the Laplace transform (LT) of the interference are derived. We also derive closed-form lower bounds on the LT of the interference for single-cluster wireless networks. The impact of different parameters on the performance is also investigated