947 research outputs found
Green Cellular Networks: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges
Energy efficiency in cellular networks is a growing concern for cellular
operators to not only maintain profitability, but also to reduce the overall
environment effects. This emerging trend of achieving energy efficiency in
cellular networks is motivating the standardization authorities and network
operators to continuously explore future technologies in order to bring
improvements in the entire network infrastructure. In this article, we present
a brief survey of methods to improve the power efficiency of cellular networks,
explore some research issues and challenges and suggest some techniques to
enable an energy efficient or "green" cellular network. Since base stations
consume a maximum portion of the total energy used in a cellular system, we
will first provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to obtain energy
savings in base stations. Next, we discuss how heterogeneous network deployment
based on micro, pico and femto-cells can be used to achieve this goal. Since
cognitive radio and cooperative relaying are undisputed future technologies in
this regard, we propose a research vision to make these technologies more
energy efficient. Lastly, we explore some broader perspectives in realizing a
"green" cellular network technologyComment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 2 table
A Simple Cooperative Diversity Method Based on Network Path Selection
Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual
antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless
environments. However most of the proposed solutions require distributed
space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future
investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel
scheme, that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the
order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best
relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this best relay for
cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a
distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology
information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel
conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the
relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on
the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate
performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided.
Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme
achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex
protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M nodes is
required, such as those proposed in [7]. The simplicity of the technique,
allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption
could provide for improved flexibility, reliability and efficiency in future 4G
wireless systems.Comment: To appear, IEEE JSAC, special issue on 4
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