5GNOW: Challenging the LTE Design Paradigms of Orthogonality and Synchronicity

LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism. 2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage (CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups. Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.Comment: Submitted to Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems for 2020 and beyond (at IEEE VTC 2013, Spring

Design and Analysis of Opportunistic MAC Protocols for Cognitive Radio Wireless Networks

As more and more wireless applications/services emerge in the market, the already heavily crowded radio spectrum becomes much scarcer. Meanwhile, however,as it is reported in the recent literature, there is a large amount of radio spectrum that is under-utilized. This motivates the concept of cognitive radio wireless networks that allow the unlicensed secondary-users (SUs) to dynamically use the vacant radio spectrum which is not being used by the licensed primary-users (PUs). In this dissertation, we investigate protocol design for both the synchronous and asynchronous cognitive radio networks with emphasis on the medium access control (MAC) layer. We propose various spectrum sharing schemes, opportunistic packet scheduling schemes, and spectrum sensing schemes in the MAC and physical (PHY) layers for different types of cognitive radio networks, allowing the SUs to opportunistically utilize the licensed spectrum while confining the level of interference to the range the PUs can tolerate. First, we propose the cross-layer based multi-channel MAC protocol, which integrates the cooperative spectrum sensing at PHY layer and the interweave-based spectrum access at MAC layer, for the synchronous cognitive radio networks. Second, we propose the channel-hopping based single-transceiver MAC protocol for the hardware-constrained synchronous cognitive radio networks, under which the SUs can identify and exploit the vacant channels by dynamically switching across the licensed channels with their distinct channel-hopping sequences. Third, we propose the opportunistic multi-channel MAC protocol with the two-threshold sequential spectrum sensing algorithm for asynchronous cognitive radio networks. Fourth, by combining the interweave and underlay spectrum sharing modes, we propose the adaptive spectrum sharing scheme for code division multiple access (CDMA) based cognitive MAC in the uplink communications over the asynchronous cognitive radio networks, where the PUs may have different types of channel usage patterns. Finally, we develop a packet scheduling scheme for the PU MAC protocol in the context of time division multiple access (TDMA)-based cognitive radio wireless networks, which is designed to operate friendly towards the SUs in terms of the vacant-channel probability. We also develop various analytical models, including the Markov chain models, M=GY =1 queuing models, cross-layer optimization models, etc., to rigorously analyze the performance of our proposed MAC protocols in terms of aggregate throughput, access delay, and packet drop rate for both the saturation network case and non-saturation network case. In addition, we conducted extensive simulations to validate our analytical models and evaluate our proposed MAC protocols/schemes. Both the numerical and simulation results show that our proposed MAC protocols/schemes can significantly improve the spectrum utilization efficiency of wireless networks

Cooperative Full-Duplex Physical and MAC Layer Design in Asynchronous Cognitive Networks

In asynchronous cognitive networks (CNs), where there is no synchronization between primary users (PUs) and secondary users (SUs), spectrum sensing becomes a challenging task. By combining cooperative spectrum sensing and full-duplex (FD) communications in asynchronous CNs, this paper demonstrates improvements in terms of the average throughput of both PUs and SUs for particular transmission schemes. The average throughputs are derived for SUs and PUs under different FD schemes, levels of residual self-interference, and number of cooperative SUs. In particular, we consider two types of FD schemes, namely, FD transmit-sense-reception (FDr) and FD transmit-sense (FDs). FDr allows SUs to transmit and receive data simultaneously, whereas, in FDs, the SUs continuously sense the channel during the transmission time. This paper shows the respective trade-offs and obtains the optimal scheme based on cooperative FD spectrum sensing. In addition, SUs’ average throughput is analyzed under different primary channel utilization and multichannel sensing schemes. Finally, new FD MAC protocol design is proposed and analyzed for FD cooperative spectrum sensing. We found optimum parameters for our proposed MAC protocol to achieve higher average throughput in certain applications

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

Design and Optimal Configuration of Full-Duplex MAC Protocol for Cognitive Radio Networks Considering Self-Interference

In this paper, we propose an adaptive Medium Access Control (MAC) protocol for full-duplex (FD) cognitive radio networks in which FD secondary users (SUs) perform channel contention followed by concurrent spectrum sensing and transmission, and transmission only with maximum power in two different stages (called the FD sensing and transmission stages, respectively) in each contention and access cycle. The proposed FD cognitive MAC (FDC-MAC) protocol does not require synchronization among SUs and it efficiently utilizes the spectrum and mitigates the self-interference in the FD transceiver. We then develop a mathematical model to analyze the throughput performance of the FDC-MAC protocol where both half-duplex (HD) transmission (HDTx) and FD transmission (FDTx) modes are considered in the transmission stage. Then, we study the FDC-MAC configuration optimization through adaptively controlling the spectrum sensing duration and transmit power level in the FD sensing stage where we prove that there exists optimal sensing time and transmit power to achieve the maximum throughput and we develop an algorithm to configure the proposed FDC-MAC protocol. Extensive numerical results are presented to illustrate the characteristic of the optimal FDC-MAC configuration and the impacts of protocol parameters and the self-interference cancellation quality on the throughput performance. Moreover, we demonstrate the significant throughput gains of the FDC-MAC protocol with respect to existing half-duplex MAC (HD MAC) and single-stage FD MAC protocols.Comment: To Appear, IEEE Access, 201