Self-Sustaining Caching Stations: Towards Cost-Effective 5G-Enabled Vehicular Networks

In this article, we investigate the cost-effective 5G-enabled vehicular networks to support emerging vehicular applications, such as autonomous driving, in-car infotainment and location-based road services. To this end, self-sustaining caching stations (SCSs) are introduced to liberate on-road base stations from the constraints of power lines and wired backhauls. Specifically, the cache-enabled SCSs are powered by renewable energy and connected to core networks through wireless backhauls, which can realize "drop-and-play" deployment, green operation, and low-latency services. With SCSs integrated, a 5G-enabled heterogeneous vehicular networking architecture is further proposed, where SCSs are deployed along roadside for traffic offloading while conventional macro base stations (MBSs) provide ubiquitous coverage to vehicles. In addition, a hierarchical network management framework is designed to deal with high dynamics in vehicular traffic and renewable energy, where content caching, energy management and traffic steering are jointly investigated to optimize the service capability of SCSs with balanced power demand and supply in different time scales. Case studies are provided to illustrate SCS deployment and operation designs, and some open research issues are also discussed.Comment: IEEE Communications Magazine, to appea

The Price of Fog: a Data-Driven Study on Caching Architectures in Vehicular Networks

Vehicular users are expected to consume large amounts of data, for both entertainment and navigation purposes. This will put a strain on cellular networks, which will be able to cope with such a load only if proper caching is in place, this in turn begs the question of which caching architecture is the best-suited to deal with vehicular content consumption. In this paper, we leverage a large-scale, crowd-collected trace to (i) characterize the vehicular traffic demand, in terms of overall magnitude and content breakup, (ii) assess how different caching approaches perform against such a real-world load, (iii) study the effect of recommendation systems and local contents. We define a price-of-fog metric, expressing the additional caching capacity to deploy when moving from traditional, centralized caching architectures to a "fog computing" approach, where caches are closer to the network edge. We find that for location-specific contents, such as the ones that vehicular users are most likely to request, such a price almost disappears. Vehicular networks thus make a strong case for the adoption of mobile-edge caching, as we are able to reap the benefit thereof -- including a reduction in the distance traveled by data, within the core network -- with little or no of the associated disadvantages.Comment: ACM IoV-VoI 2016 MobiHoc Workshop, The 17th ACM International Symposium on Mobile Ad Hoc Networking and Computing: MobiHoc 2016-IoV-VoI Workshop, Paderborn, German

SymbioCity: Smart Cities for Smarter Networks

The "Smart City" (SC) concept revolves around the idea of embodying cutting-edge ICT solutions in the very fabric of future cities, in order to offer new and better services to citizens while lowering the city management costs, both in monetary, social, and environmental terms. In this framework, communication technologies are perceived as subservient to the SC services, providing the means to collect and process the data needed to make the services function. In this paper, we propose a new vision in which technology and SC services are designed to take advantage of each other in a symbiotic manner. According to this new paradigm, which we call "SymbioCity", SC services can indeed be exploited to improve the performance of the same communication systems that provide them with data. Suggestive examples of this symbiotic ecosystem are discussed in the paper. The dissertation is then substantiated in a proof-of-concept case study, where we show how the traffic monitoring service provided by the London Smart City initiative can be used to predict the density of users in a certain zone and optimize the cellular service in that area.Comment: 14 pages, submitted for publication to ETT Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologie

Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks

Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders of magnitude, or even more, is possible.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.843

V2X Meets NOMA: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks

Benefited from the widely deployed infrastructure, the LTE network has recently been considered as a promising candidate to support the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services. However, with a massive number of devices accessing the V2X network in the future, the conventional OFDM-based LTE network faces the congestion issues due to its low efficiency of orthogonal access, resulting in significant access delay and posing a great challenge especially to safety-critical applications. The non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique has been well recognized as an effective solution for the future 5G cellular networks to provide broadband communications and massive connectivity. In this article, we investigate the applicability of NOMA in supporting cellular V2X services to achieve low latency and high reliability. Starting with a basic V2X unicast system, a novel NOMA-based scheme is proposed to tackle the technical hurdles in designing high spectral efficient scheduling and resource allocation schemes in the ultra dense topology. We then extend it to a more general V2X broadcasting system. Other NOMA-based extended V2X applications and some open issues are also discussed.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin