Modeling and performance analysis of opportunistic link selection for UAV communication

In anticipation of wide implementation of 5G technologies, the scarcity of spectrum resources for the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communication remains one of the major challenges in arranging safe drone operations. Dynamic spectrum management among multiple UAVs as a tool that is able to address this issue, requires integrated solutions with considerations of heterogeneous link types and support of the multi-UAV operations. This paper proposes a synthesized resource allocation and opportunistic link selection (RA-OLS) scheme for the air-to-ground (A2G) UAV communication with dynamic link selections. The link opportunities using link hopping sequences (LHSs) are allocated in the GCSs for alleviating the internal collisions within the UAV network, offloading the on-board computations in the spectrum processing function, and avoiding the contention in the air. In this context, exclusive technical solutions are proposed to form the prototype system. A sub-optimal allocation method based on the greedy algorithm is presented for addressing the resource allocation problem. A mathematical model of the RA-OLS throughput with above propositions is formulated for the spectrum dense and scarce environments. An interference factor is introduced to measure the protection effects on the primary users. The proposed throughput model approximates the simulated communication under requirements of small errors in the spectrum dense environment and the spectrum scarce environment, where the sensitivity analysis is implemented. The proposed RA-OLS outperforms the static communication scheme in terms of the utilization rate by over 50% in case when multiple links are available. It also enables the collaborative communication when the spectral resources are in scarcity. The impacts from diverse parameters on the RA-OLS communication performance are analyzed

Adoption of vehicular ad hoc networking protocols by networked robots

This paper focuses on the utilization of wireless networking in the robotics domain. Many researchers have already equipped their robots with wireless communication capabilities, stimulated by the observation that multi-robot systems tend to have several advantages over their single-robot counterparts. Typically, this integration of wireless communication is tackled in a quite pragmatic manner, only a few authors presented novel Robotic Ad Hoc Network (RANET) protocols that were designed specifically with robotic use cases in mind. This is in sharp contrast with the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). This observation is the starting point of this paper. If the results of previous efforts focusing on VANET protocols could be reused in the RANET domain, this could lead to rapid progress in the field of networked robots. To investigate this possibility, this paper provides a thorough overview of the related work in the domain of robotic and vehicular ad hoc networks. Based on this information, an exhaustive list of requirements is defined for both types. It is concluded that the most significant difference lies in the fact that VANET protocols are oriented towards low throughput messaging, while RANET protocols have to support high throughput media streaming as well. Although not always with equal importance, all other defined requirements are valid for both protocols. This leads to the conclusion that cross-fertilization between them is an appealing approach for future RANET research. To support such developments, this paper concludes with the definition of an appropriate working plan

Taming and Leveraging Directionality and Blockage in Millimeter Wave Communications

To cope with the challenge for high-rate data transmission, Millimeter Wave(mmWave) is one potential solution. The short wavelength unlatched the era of directional mobile communication. The semi-optical communication requires revolutionary thinking. To assist the research and evaluate various algorithms, we build a motion-sensitive mmWave testbed with two degrees of freedom for environmental sensing and general wireless communication.The first part of this thesis contains two approaches to maintain the connection in mmWave mobile communication. The first one seeks to solve the beam tracking problem using motion sensor within the mobile device. A tracking algorithm is given and integrated into the tracking protocol. Detailed experiments and numerical simulations compared several compensation schemes with optical benchmark and demonstrated the efficiency of overhead reduction. The second strategy attempts to mitigate intermittent connections during roaming is multi-connectivity. Taking advantage of properties of rateless erasure code, a fountain code type multi-connectivity mechanism is proposed to increase the link reliability with simplified backhaul mechanism. The simulation demonstrates the efficiency and robustness of our system design with a multi-link channel record.The second topic in this thesis explores various techniques in blockage mitigation. A fast hear-beat like channel with heavy blockage loss is identified in the mmWave Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) communication experiment due to the propeller blockage. These blockage patterns are detected through Holm\u27s procedure as a problem of multi-time series edge detection. To reduce the blockage effect, an adaptive modulation and coding scheme is designed. The simulation results show that it could greatly improve the throughput given appropriately predicted patterns. The last but not the least, the blockage of directional communication also appears as a blessing because the geometrical information and blockage event of ancillary signal paths can be utilized to predict the blockage timing for the current transmission path. A geometrical model and prediction algorithm are derived to resolve the blockage time and initiate active handovers. An experiment provides solid proof of multi-paths properties and the numeral simulation demonstrates the efficiency of the proposed algorithm

Performance Analysis of ML-based MTC Traffic Pattern Predictors

Prolonging the lifetime of massive machine-type communication (MTC) networks is key to realizing a sustainable digitized society. Great energy savings can be achieved by accurately predicting MTC traffic followed by properly designed resource allocation mechanisms. However, selecting the proper MTC traffic predictor is not straightforward and depends on accuracy/complexity trade-offs and the specific MTC applications and network characteristics. Remarkably, the related state-of-the-art literature still lacks such debates. Herein, we assess the performance of several machine learning (ML) methods to predict Poisson and quasi-periodic MTC traffic in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Results show that the temporal convolutional network (TCN) outperforms the long-short term memory (LSTM), the gated recurrent units (GRU), and the recurrent neural network (RNN), in that order. For Poisson traffic, the accuracy gap between the predictors is larger than under quasi-periodic traffic. Finally, we show that running a TCN predictor is around three times more costly than other methods, while the training/inference time is the greatest/least.Comment: IEEE Wireless Communications Letters Print ISSN: 2162-2337 Online ISSN: 2162-234

Accuracy-awareness: A pessimistic approach to optimal control of triggered mobile communication networks

We use nonlinear model predictive control to procure a joint control of mobility and transmission to minimize total network communication energy use. The nonlinear optimization problem is solved numerically in a self-triggered framework, where the next control update time depends on the predicted state trajectory and the accuracy of the numerical solution. Solution accuracy must be accounted for in any circumstance where systems are run in open-loop for long stretches of time based on potentially inaccurate predictions. These triggering conditions allow us to place wireless nodes in low energy ‘idle' states for extended periods, saving over 70% of energy compared to a periodic policy where nodes consistently use energy to receive control updates