ActMesh- A Cognitive Resource Management paradigm for dynamic mobile Internet Access with Reliability Guarantees

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are going increasing attention as a flexible low-cost networking architecture to provide media Internet access over metropolitan areas to mobile clients requiring multimedia services. In WMNs, Mesh Routers (MRs) from the mesh backbone and accomplish the twofold task of traffic forwarding, as well as providing multimedia access to mobile Mesh Clients (MCs). Due to the intensive bandwidth-resource requested for supporting QoS-demanding multimedia services, performance of the current WMNs is mainly limited by spectrum-crowding and traffic-congestion, as only scarce spectrum-resources is currently licensed for the MCs' access. In principle, this problem could be mitigated by exploiting in a media-friendly (e.g., content-aware) way the context-aware capabilities offered by the Cognitive Radio (CR) paradigm. As integrated exploitation of both content and context-aware system's capabilities is at the basis of our proposed Active Mesh (ActMesh) networking paradigm. This last aims at defining a network-wide architecture for realizing media-friendly Cognitive Mesh nets (e.g., context aware Cognitive Mesh nets). Hence, main contribution of this work is four fold: 1. After introducing main functional blocks of our ActMesh architecture, suitable self-adaptive Belief Propagation and Soft Data Fusion algorithms are designed to provide context-awareness. This is done under both cooperative and noncooperative sensing frameworks. 2. The resulting network-wide resource management problem is modelled as a constrained stochastic Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem, with the dual (contrasting) objective to maximize spectrum efficiency at the network level, while accounting for the perceived quality of the delivered media flows at the client level. 3. A fully distributed, scalable and self-adaptive implementation of the resulting Active Resource Manager (ARM) is deployed, that explicitly accounts for the energy limits of the battery powered MCs and the effects induced by both fading and client mobility. Due to informationally decentralized architecture of the ActMesh net, the complexity of (possibly, optimal) centralized solutions for resource management becomes prohibitive when number of MCs accessing ActMesh net grow. Furthermore, centralized resource management solutions could required large amounts of time to collect and process the required network information, which, in turn, induce delay that can be unacceptable for delay sensitive media applications, e.g., multimedia streaming. Hence, it is important to develop network-wide ARM policies that are both distributed and scalable by exploiting the radio MCs capabilities to sense, adapt and coordinate themselves. We validate our analytical models via simulation based numerical tests, that support actual effectiveness of the overall ActMesh paradigm, both in terms of objective and subjective performance metrics. In particular, the basic tradeoff among backbone traffic-vs-access traffic arising in the ActMesh net from the bandwidth-efficient opportunistic resource allocation policy pursued by the deployed ARM is numerically characterized. The standardization framework we inspire to is the emerging IEEE 802.16h one

ActMesh- A Cognitive Resource Management paradigm for dynamic mobile Internet Access with Reliability Guarantees

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) are going increasing attention as a flexible low-cost networking architecture to provide media Internet access over metropolitan areas to mobile clients requiring multimedia services. In WMNs, Mesh Routers (MRs) from the mesh backbone and accomplish the twofold task of traffic forwarding, as well as providing multimedia access to mobile Mesh Clients (MCs). Due to the intensive bandwidth-resource requested for supporting QoS-demanding multimedia services, performance of the current WMNs is mainly limited by spectrum-crowding and traffic-congestion, as only scarce spectrum-resources is currently licensed for the MCs' access. In principle, this problem could be mitigated by exploiting in a media-friendly (e.g., content-aware) way the context-aware capabilities offered by the Cognitive Radio (CR) paradigm. As integrated exploitation of both content and context-aware system's capabilities is at the basis of our proposed Active Mesh (ActMesh) networking paradigm. This last aims at defining a network-wide architecture for realizing media-friendly Cognitive Mesh nets (e.g., context aware Cognitive Mesh nets). Hence, main contribution of this work is four fold: 1. After introducing main functional blocks of our ActMesh architecture, suitable self-adaptive Belief Propagation and Soft Data Fusion algorithms are designed to provide context-awareness. This is done under both cooperative and noncooperative sensing frameworks. 2. The resulting network-wide resource management problem is modelled as a constrained stochastic Network Utility Maximization (NUM) problem, with the dual (contrasting) objective to maximize spectrum efficiency at the network level, while accounting for the perceived quality of the delivered media flows at the client level. 3. A fully distributed, scalable and self-adaptive implementation of the resulting Active Resource Manager (ARM) is deployed, that explicitly accounts for the energy limits of the battery powered MCs and the effects induced by both fading and client mobility. Due to informationally decentralized architecture of the ActMesh net, the complexity of (possibly, optimal) centralized solutions for resource management becomes prohibitive when number of MCs accessing ActMesh net grow. Furthermore, centralized resource management solutions could required large amounts of time to collect and process the required network information, which, in turn, induce delay that can be unacceptable for delay sensitive media applications, e.g., multimedia streaming. Hence, it is important to develop network-wide ARM policies that are both distributed and scalable by exploiting the radio MCs capabilities to sense, adapt and coordinate themselves. We validate our analytical models via simulation based numerical tests, that support actual effectiveness of the overall ActMesh paradigm, both in terms of objective and subjective performance metrics. In particular, the basic tradeoff among backbone traffic-vs-access traffic arising in the ActMesh net from the bandwidth-efficient opportunistic resource allocation policy pursued by the deployed ARM is numerically characterized. The standardization framework we inspire to is the emerging IEEE 802.16h one

Cognitive Radio Systems

Cognitive radio is a hot research area for future wireless communications in the recent years. In order to increase the spectrum utilization, cognitive radio makes it possible for unlicensed users to access the spectrum unoccupied by licensed users. Cognitive radio let the equipments more intelligent to communicate with each other in a spectrum-aware manner and provide a new approach for the co-existence of multiple wireless systems. The goal of this book is to provide highlights of the current research topics in the field of cognitive radio systems. The book consists of 17 chapters, addressing various problems in cognitive radio systems

Power Control and Cooperative Sensing in Cognitive Radio

The traditional ways of spectrum management is inefficient as large portions of useable spectrum is left idle most periods of the day hence the call for more dynamic spectrum management techniques. Cognitive Radio (CR) is considered a viable means to vastly improve the efficiency of spectrum since it allows unlicensed users access to licenced spectrum as long as the quality of service is not downgraded. This research investigates the major problems associated with designing CRs. An in-depth analysis shows that the two major problems that hinders the successful design of CR systems are that of spectrum sensing (How the device detects the Primary User (PU)) and Power Control (which focuses on the level of transmit power of CR devices so as not to induce interference to PUs). To solve the problem of power control in this research, we consider a single cell scenario where N CR terminals are operating in a network with a Cognitive base station (CBS) together with one PU along with its Primary Base station (PBS). In the scenario, CR devices will generally seek to improve quality of service by increasing it’s transmit power. This increase introduces interference to the PU. To mitigate this, the CR devices are modelled as players of a non-cooperative game where offending devices are penalised till a Nash equilibrium level is achieved. At this point, the players can no longer influence the state of the game no matter the strategy they chose to play. The work is extended to cover CR internet of things devices by exploiting the adequate path loss exponent for the operational environment. The power control algorithm is compared with two other known power control algorithms and it outperforms them in average power, average SNR and rate of convergence. Spectrum sensing in CRs has been shown in literature to improve when done cooperatively rather than individually. To this end, this research focuses on cooperative sensing which allows the radios to make decision on their channel state based on the combine results of individual radios. The channel is modelled as a frame- by frame structure of equal length using the slotted aloha access contention technique. Each frame has a fixed length and is made up of sensing, prediction and transmission periods. It is seen observed that longer sensing periods results in better sensing results but considerable lower throughput. The scenario researched involves a CR network with K CRs and M sub-channels. It is assumed that the conditions of all sub-channels are equal, and each CR randomly chooses any one to sense and the throughput is measured. The interference caused to the PU are measured by collisions in the system. This are of two types: (1) Collisions with PUs due to missed detections and (2) collisions with other CRs due to access contention. Whenever there is a collision, the packet is withheld by the system and transmission is stopped. The throughput is a measure of successful packet transmissions. The derived algorithm improved the throughput by detecting the optimal sensing period. Using the K-of-M fusion decision rule, the sensing algorithm guarantees that optimal throughput can be achieved when 50% of the cognitive radio correctly detects the state of the spectrum. Cognitive radio throughput will be of very grave importance. Especially in spectrums like TVWSs and radar systems. A throughput model with power control is presented. The aim is to improve the throughput in interweave scenarios

Chapter Flexible Network Codes Design for Cooperative Diversity

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SPECTRUM SHARING IN COGNITIVE RADIO NETWORKS WITH QUALITY OF SERVICE AWARENESS

The goal of this thesis is to study performance of cognitive radio networks in terms of total spectrum utilization and throughput of secondary networks under perfect and imperfect sensing for Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and fading channels. The effect of imperfect sensing was studied by applying non-collaborative and collaborative sensing techniques using energy detecting and square law combining techniques, respectively. Spectrum allocation for heterogeneous networks in cognitive radio networks was discussed and a new sharing algorithm that guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for different secondary users’ applications was proposed. The throughput degradation of secondary users due to the activities of the primary users was explored by varying the arrival rate of the primary users in a given spectrum band. Computer simulation showed that increasing the primary user’s activity will increase the total spectrum utilization but decreases the secondary users’ throughput simultaneously. The effect of the received Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) of the primary user on the cognitive radio network performance is studied in which, a high SNR of primary users led to a higher throughput of secondary network in AWGN channels compared to Nakagami fading channels. The effect of applying cooperative sensing is also presented in this thesis. As we increased the number of cooperating sensors, the network throughput increased which proves the advantage of applying cooperative sensing. A spectrum allocation algorithm for heterogeneous network model is developed to study the QoS assurance of secondary users in cognitive radio networks. The system performance of the heterogeneous network was investigated in terms of the total spectrum utilization. It is found that, higher number of secondary users, better channel’s condition and low required QoS of applications would increase the spectrum utilization significantly. vii In this thesis, the proposed allocation algorithm was applied to the heterogeneous cognitive radio model and its performance was compared to the First Come First Served (FCFS) algorithm in both AWGN and fading channels. The proposed algorithm provided a higher average SNR and spectrum utilization than FCFS algorithm and guaranteed the QoS requirement for applications of secondary users. The effect of imperfect sensing on the system performance was investigated, and it was shown that, as the probability of detection increases the total applications’ data rate increases significantly. The proposed algorithm guaranteed the QoS requirement for each application of secondary users. The effect of imperfect sensing on the system performance was investigated, and it was shown that, as the probability of detection increases the total data rate increases significantly