Impact of Channel Asymmetry on Performance of Channel Estimation and Precoding for Downlink Base Station Cooperative Transmission

Base station (BS) cooperative transmission can improve the spectrum efficiency of cellular systems, whereas using which the channels will become asymmetry. In this paper, we study the impact of the asymmetry on the performance of channel estimation and precoding in downlink BS cooperative multiple-antenna multiple-carrier systems. We first present three linear estimators which jointly estimate the channel coefficients from users in different cells with minimum mean square error, robust design and least square criterion, and then study the impact of uplink channel asymmetry on their performance. It is shown that when the large scale channel information is exploited for channel estimation, using non-orthogonal training sequences among users in different cells leads to minor performance loss. Next, we analyze the impact of downlink channel asymmetry on the performance of precoding with channel estimation errors. Our analysis shows that although the estimation errors of weak cross links are large, the resulting rate loss is minor because their contributions are weighted by the receive signal to noise ratio. The simulation results verify our analysis and show that the rate loss per user is almost constant no matter where the user is located, when the channel estimators exploiting the large scale fading gains.Comment: Submitted to the Transactions on Communication

Cross-Technology Communications for Heterogeneous IoT Devices Through Artificial Doppler Shifts

Recent years have seen major innovations in developing energy-efficient wireless technologies such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for Internet of Things (IoT). Despite demonstrating significant benefits in providing low power transmission and massive connectivity, hardly any of these technologies have made it to directly connect to the Internet. Recent advances demonstrate the viability of direct communication among heterogeneous IoT devices with incompatible physical (PHY) layers. These techniques, however, require modifications in transmission power or time, which may affect the media access control (MAC) layer behaviors in legacy networks. In this paper, we argue that the frequency domain can serve as a free side channel with minimal interruptions to legacy networks. To this end, we propose DopplerFi, a communication framework that enables a two-way communication channel between BLE and Wi-Fi by injecting artificial Doppler shifts, which can be decoded by sensing the patterns in the Gaussian frequency shift keying (GFSK) demodulator and Channel State Information (CSI). The artificial Doppler shifts can be compensated by the inherent frequency synchronization module and thus have a negligible impact on legacy communications. Our evaluation using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) BLE chips and 802.11-compliant testbeds have demonstrated that DopplerFi can achieve throughput up to 6.5~Kbps at the cost of merely less than 0.8% throughput loss

Large-scale Antenna Operation in Heterogeneous Cloud Radio Access Networks: A Partial Centralization Approach

To satisfy the ever-increasing capacity demand and quality of service (QoS) requirements of users, 5G cellular systems will take the form of heterogeneous networks (HetNets) that consist of macro cells and small cells. To build and operate such systems, mobile operators have given significant attention to cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) due to their beneficial features of performance optimization and cost effectiveness. Along with the architectural enhancement of C-RAN, large-scale antennas (a.k.a. massive MIMO) at cell sites contribute greatly to increased network capacity either with higher spectral efficiency or through permitting many users at once. In this article, we discuss the challenging issues of C-RAN based HetNets (H-CRAN), especially with respect to large-scale antenna operation. We provide an overview of existing C-RAN architectures in terms of large-scale antenna operation and promote a partially centralized approach. This approach reduces, remarkably, fronthaul overheads in CRANs with large-scale antennas. We also provide some insights into its potential and applicability in the fronthaul bandwidthlimited H-CRAN with large-scale antennas.Comment: To appear in IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine June 201

A Journey from Improper Gaussian Signaling to Asymmetric Signaling

The deviation of continuous and discrete complex random variables from the traditional proper and symmetric assumption to a generalized improper and asymmetric characterization (accounting correlation between a random entity and its complex conjugate), respectively, introduces new design freedom and various potential merits. As such, the theory of impropriety has vast applications in medicine, geology, acoustics, optics, image and pattern recognition, computer vision, and other numerous research fields with our main focus on the communication systems. The journey begins from the design of improper Gaussian signaling in the interference-limited communications and leads to a more elaborate and practically feasible asymmetric discrete modulation design. Such asymmetric shaping bridges the gap between theoretically and practically achievable limits with sophisticated transceiver and detection schemes in both coded/uncoded wireless/optical communication systems. Interestingly, introducing asymmetry and adjusting the transmission parameters according to some design criterion render optimal performance without affecting the bandwidth or power requirements of the systems. This dual-flavored article initially presents the tutorial base content covering the interplay of reality/complexity, propriety/impropriety and circularity/noncircularity and then surveys majority of the contributions in this enormous journey.Comment: IEEE COMST (Early Access

Uplink CoMP under a Constrained Backhaul and Imperfect Channel Knowledge

Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) is known to be a key technology for next generation mobile communications systems, as it allows to overcome the burden of inter-cell interference. Especially in the uplink, it is likely that interference exploitation schemes will be used in the near future, as they can be used with legacy terminals and require no or little changes in standardization. Major drawbacks, however, are the extent of additional backhaul infrastructure needed, and the sensitivity to imperfect channel knowledge. This paper jointly addresses both issues in a new framework incorporating a multitude of proposed theoretical uplink CoMP concepts, which are then put into perspective with practical CoMP algorithms. This comprehensive analysis provides new insight into the potential usage of uplink CoMP in next generation wireless communications systems.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications in February 201

Resilient networking in wireless sensor networks

This report deals with security in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), especially in network layer. Multiple secure routing protocols have been proposed in the literature. However, they often use the cryptography to secure routing functionalities. The cryptography alone is not enough to defend against multiple attacks due to the node compromise. Therefore, we need more algorithmic solutions. In this report, we focus on the behavior of routing protocols to determine which properties make them more resilient to attacks. Our aim is to find some answers to the following questions. Are there any existing protocols, not designed initially for security, but which already contain some inherently resilient properties against attacks under which some portion of the network nodes is compromised? If yes, which specific behaviors are making these protocols more resilient? We propose in this report an overview of security strategies for WSNs in general, including existing attacks and defensive measures. In this report we focus at the network layer in particular, and an analysis of the behavior of four particular routing protocols is provided to determine their inherent resiliency to insider attacks. The protocols considered are: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Gradient-Based Routing (GBR), Greedy Forwarding (GF) and Random Walk Routing (RWR)

Backhaul Limited Asymmetric Cooperation for MIMO Cellular Networks via Semidefinite Relaxation

Multicell cooperation has recently attracted tremendous attention because of its ability to eliminate intercell interference and increase spectral efficiency. However, the enormous amount of information being exchanged, including channel state information and user data, over backhaul links may deteriorate the network performance in a realistic system. This paper adopts a backhaul cost metric that considers the number of active directional cooperation links, which gives a first order measurement of the backhaul loading required in asymmetric Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) cooperation. We focus on a downlink scenario for multi-antenna base stations and single-antenna mobile stations. The design problem is minimizing the number of active directional cooperation links and jointly optimizing the beamforming vectors among the cooperative BSs subject to signal-to-interference-and-noise-ratio (SINR) constraints at the mobile station. This problem is non-convex and solving it requires combinatorial search. A practical algorithm based on smooth approximation and semidefinite relaxation is proposed to solve the combinatorial problem efficiently. We show that semidefinite relaxation is tight with probability 1 in our algorithm and stationary convergence is guaranteed. Simulation results show the saving of backhaul cost and power consumption is notable compared with several baseline schemes and its effectiveness is demonstrated.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures. This paper is accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Security and Privacy Issues in Wireless Mesh Networks: A Survey

This book chapter identifies various security threats in wireless mesh network (WMN). Keeping in mind the critical requirement of security and user privacy in WMNs, this chapter provides a comprehensive overview of various possible attacks on different layers of the communication protocol stack for WMNs and their corresponding defense mechanisms. First, it identifies the security vulnerabilities in the physical, link, network, transport, application layers. Furthermore, various possible attacks on the key management protocols, user authentication and access control protocols, and user privacy preservation protocols are presented. After enumerating various possible attacks, the chapter provides a detailed discussion on various existing security mechanisms and protocols to defend against and wherever possible prevent the possible attacks. Comparative analyses are also presented on the security schemes with regards to the cryptographic schemes used, key management strategies deployed, use of any trusted third party, computation and communication overhead involved etc. The chapter then presents a brief discussion on various trust management approaches for WMNs since trust and reputation-based schemes are increasingly becoming popular for enforcing security in wireless networks. A number of open problems in security and privacy issues for WMNs are subsequently discussed before the chapter is finally concluded.Comment: 62 pages, 12 figures, 6 tables. This chapter is an extension of the author's previous submission in arXiv submission: arXiv:1102.1226. There are some text overlaps with the previous submissio

To Motivate Social Grouping in Wireless Networks

We consider a group of neighboring smartphone users who are roughly at the same time interested in the same network content, called common interests. However, ever-increasing data traffic challenges the limited capacity of base-stations (BSs) in wireless networks. To better utilize the limited BSs' resources under unreliable wireless networks, we propose local common-interests sharing (enabled by D2D communications) by motivating the physically neighboring users to form a social group. As users are selfish in practice, an incentive mechanism is needed to motivate social grouping. We propose a novel concept of equal-reciprocal incentive over broadcast communications, which fairly ensures that each pair of the users in the social group share the same amount of content with each other. As the equal-reciprocal incentive may restrict the amount of content shared among the users, we analyze the optimal equal-reciprocal scheme that maximizes local sharing content. While ensuring fairness among users, we show that this optimized scheme also maximizes each user's utility in the social group. Finally, we look at dynamic content arrivals and extend our scheme successfully by proposing novel on-line scheduling algorithms.Comment: 32 pages (single column), submitted for possible journal publicatio