Multicast Scheduling and Resource Allocation Algorithms for OFDMA-Based Systems: A Survey

Multicasting is emerging as an enabling technology for multimedia transmissions over wireless networks to support several groups of users with flexible quality of service (QoS)requirements. Although multicast has huge potential to push the limits of next generation communication systems; it is however one of the most challenging issues currently being addressed. In this survey, we explain multicast group formation and various forms of group rate determination approaches. We also provide a systematic review of recent channel-aware multicast scheduling and resource allocation (MSRA) techniques proposed for downlink multicast services in OFDMA based systems. We study these enabling algorithms, evaluate their core characteristics, limitations and classify them using multidimensional matrix. We cohesively review the algorithms in terms of their throughput maximization, fairness considerations, performance complexities, multi-antenna support, optimality and simplifying assumptions. We discuss existing standards employing multicasting and further highlight some potential research opportunities in multicast systems

Policy-Based Radio Resource Management in Multicast OFDMA Systems

Η ασύρματηφασματική αποδοτικότητα είναι ένας, όλο και περισσότερο, σημαντικός παράγοντας εξαιτίας της ταχείας ανάπτυξης των ασύρματων υπηρεσιών ευρείας ζώνης. Η σχεδίαση ενός συστήματος με πολλά φέροντα, όπως είναι ένα σύστημα OFDMA,επιτρέπει στα συστήματα να έχουν υψηλή χωρητικότητα για να ικανοποιήσουν τις απαιτήσεις των υπηρεσιών ευρείας ζώνης.Αυτή η αυξημένη χωρητικότητα των συστημάτων μπορεί να βελτιστοποιηθεί περαιτέρω εκμεταλλευόμενοι καλύτερα τα χαρακτηριστικά των ασύρματων καναλιών. Ηθεμελιώδηςιδέα ενός σχήματος κατανομής πόρων είναι η αποτελεσματική κατανομή των διαθέσιμων ασύρματων πόρων, όπως είναι οι υποφορείς και η ισχύς εκπομπής, μεταξύ των χρηστών του συστήματος. Σχετικά με τα προβλήματα της κατανομής πόρων σε ασύρματα συστήματα τηλεπικοινωνιών βασισμένα στην τεχνική OFDMA, η περισσότερη έρευνα επικεντρώνεται στην αναζήτηση πολιτικών ανάθεσης υποφορέων και ισχύος. Οι διαθέσιμες τεχνικές της βιβλιογραφίας δεν μπορούν να εφαρμοστούν όπως είναι σε συστήματα πολυεκπομπής. Επιπλέον, οι υπάρχουσες τεχνικές δεν μπορούν να εφαρμοστούν αμετάβλητες σε πραγματικά συστήματα στα οποία υπάρχει μεγάλος αριθμός OFDMυποφορέων, καθώς η υπολογιστική πολυπλοκότητα είναι πολύ μεγάλη. Ο βασικός στόχος της παρούσας διπλωματικής εργασίας είναι η πρόταση ικανών μηχανισμών κατανομής των διαθέσιμων υποφορέων σε ασύρματα συστήματα πολυεκπομπής χρησιμοποιώντας την τεχνολογία OFDMA. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, σχετικά με τα συστήματα πολυεκπομπής, θεωρούμε ότι τόσο ο σταθμός βάσης όσο και κάθε χρήστης είναι εφοδιασμένοι με μοναδική κεραία και η μονάδα κατανομής δεν είναι ο υποφορέας, όπως στα συμβατικά συστήματα OFDMA, αλλά μία ομάδα γειτονικώνυποφορέων, η οποία ονομάζεται τεμάχιο, με σκοπό τη μείωση της μεγάλης υπολογιστικής πολυπλοκότητας. Ένας αποτελεσματικός αλγόριθμος προτείνεται του οποίου ο στόχος είναι η μεγιστοποίηση του συνολικού ρυθμού μετάδοσης δεδομένων με περιορισμούς στη συνολική διαθέσιμη ισχύ, στο BERανά τεμάχιο και στους αναλογικούς περιορισμούς μεταξύ των ρυθμών μετάδοσης δεδομένων των ομάδων χρηστών. Η προσομοίωση και η ανάλυση της πολυπλοκότητας που παρουσιάζονται, υποστηρίζουν τα πλεονεκτήματα της κατανομής πόρων σε συστήματα πολυεκπομπήςOFDMA τα οποία βασίζονται σε κατανομή τεμαχίων και έχουν ως στόχος την εξασφάλιση της αναλογικότητας μεταξύ των ρυθμών μετάδοσης δεδομένων των ομάδων χρηστών.Wireless spectral efficiency is increasingly important due to the rapid growth of demand for high data rate wideband wireless services. The design of a multi-carrier system, such as an OFDMA system, enables high system capacity suited for these wideband wireless services. This system capacity can be further optimized with a resource allocation scheme by exploiting the characteristics of the wireless fading channels. The fundamental idea of a resource allocation scheme is to efficiently distribute the available wireless resources, such as the subcarriers and transmission power, among all admitted users in the system. Regarding the problems of resource allocation in OFDMA-based wireless communicationsystems, much of the research effort mainly focuses on finding efficient power controland subcarrier assignment policies. With systems employing multicast transmission,the available schemes in literature are not always applicable. Moreover, the existing approachesare particularly inaccessible in practical systems in which there are a large numberof OFDM subcarriers being utilized, as the required computational burden is prohibitivelyhigh. The ultimate goal of this Thesis is therefore to propose affordable mechanisms toflexibly and effectively share out the available resources in multicast wireless systems deployingOFDMA technology. Specifically, according to multicast system, it is assumed thatboth the BS and each user are equipped witha single antenna and the allocation unit is not the subcarrier,as in conventional OFDMA systems, but a set of contiguoussubcarriers, which is called chunk, in order to alleviate the heavy computational burden. An efficient algorithmis proposed whose aim is to maximize the total throughput subject to constraints on totalavailable power,BER over a chunk, and proportional data rates constraints among multicast groups. Simulation and complexity analysis are provided to support thebenefits of chunk-based resource allocation to multicast OFDMA systems with targeting proportional data rates among multicast groups

Non-orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) with Asynchronous Interference Cancellation

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) allows allocating one carrier to more than one user at the same time in one cell. It is a promising technology to provide high throughput due to carrier reuse within a cell. In this thesis, a novel interference cancellation (IC) technique is proposed for asynchronous NOMA systems, which uses multiple symbols from each interfering user to carry out IC. With the multiple symbol information from each interfering user the IC performance can be improved substantially. The proposed technique creates and processes so called "IC Triangles". That is, the order of symbol detection is based on detecting all the overlapping symbols of a stonger user before detecting a symbol of a weak user. Also, successive IC (SIC) is employed in the proposed technique. Employing IC Triangles together with the SIC suppresses co-channel interference from strong (earlier detected) signals for relatively weak (yet to be detected) signals and make it possible to achieve low bit error rate (BER) for all users. Further, iterative signal processing is used to improve the system performance. Employing multiple iterations of symbol detection which is based on exploiting a priori estimate obtained from the previous iteration can improve the detection and IC performances. The BER and capacity performance analyses of an uplink NOMA system with the proposed IC technique are presented, along with the comparison to orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Performance analyses validate the requirement for a novel IC technique that addresses asynchronism at NOMA uplink transmissions. Also, numerical and simulation results show that NOMA with the proposed IC technique outperforms OFDMA for uplink transmissions. It is also concluded from the research that, in the NOMA system, users are required to have large received power ratio to satisfy BER requirements and the required received power ratio increases with increasing the modulation level. Also, employing iterative IC provides significant performance gain in NOMA and the number of required iterations depend on the modulation level and detection method. Further, at uplink transmissions, users' BER and capacity performances strongly depend on the relative time offset between interfering users, besides the received power ratio

Cross-layer design for OFDMA wireless networks with finite queue length based on game theory

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University London.In next generation wireless networks such as 4G- LTE and WiMax, the demand for high data rates, the scarcity of wireless resources and the time varying channel conditions has led to the adoption of more sophisticated and robust techniques in PHY such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and the corresponding access technique known as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA). Cross-layer schedulers have been developed in order to describe the procedure of resource allocation in OFDMA wireless networks. The resource allocation in OFDMA wireless networks has received great attention in research, by proposing many different ways for frequency diversity exploitation and system’s optimization. Many cross-layer proposals for dynamic resource allocation have been investigated in literature approaching the optimization problem from different viewpoints i.e. maximizing total data rate, minimizing total transmit power, satisfying minimum users’ requirements or providing fairness amongst users. The design of a cross-layer scheduler for OFDMA wireless networks is the topic of this research. The scheduler utilizes game theory in order to make decisions for subcarrier and power allocation to the users with the main concern being to maintain fairness as well as to maximize overall system’s performance. A very well known theorem in cooperative game theory, the Nash Bargaining Solution (NBS), is employed and solved in a close form way, resulting in a Pareto optimal solution. Two different cases are proposed. The first one is the symmetric NBS (S-NBS) where all users have the same weight and therefore all users have the same opportunity for resources and the second one, is the asymmetric NBS (A-NBS), where users have different weights, hence different priorities where the scheduler favours users with higher priorities at expense of lower priority users. As MAC layer is vital for cross-layer, the scheduler is combined with a queuing model based on Markov chain in order to describe more realistically the incoming procedure from the higher layers

CPM-SC-IFDMA--A Power Efficient Transmission Scheme for Uplink LTE

In this thesis we have proposed a power efficient transmission scheme, CPM-SC-IFDMA, for uplink LTE. In uplink LTE, efficiency of the transmitter power amplier is a major concern, as the transmitter is placed in the mobile device which has limited power supply. The proposed scheme, CPM-SC-IFDMA, combines the key advantages of CPM (continuous phase modulation) with SC-IFDMA (single carrier frequency division multiple access with interleaved subcarrier mapping) in order to increase the power amplier efficiency of the transmitter. In this work, we have analyzed the bit error rate (BER) performance of the proposed scheme in LTE specied channels. The BER performance of two CPM-SC-IFDMA scheme are compared with that of a LTE specied transmission scheme, QPSK-LFDMA (QPSK modulated SC-FDMA with localized subcarrier mapping), combined with convolutional coding (CC-QPSK-LFDMA). We first show that CPM-SC-IFDMA has a much higher power efficiency than CC-QPSK-LFDMA by simulating the PAPR (peak-to-average-power-ratio) plots. Then, using the data from the PAPR plots and the conventional BER plots (BER as a function of signal-to-noise-ratio), we show that, when the net BER, obtained by compensating for the power efficiency loss, is considered, CPM-SC-IFDMA has a superior performance relative to CC-QPSK-LFDMA by up to 3.8 dB, in the LTE specified channels

Resource Allocation in Drone-Assisted Emergency Communication Systems

Due to low cost and high mobility, drones are considered important in emergency communications. In this thesis, we consider a unique drone assisted emergency communication system used in disaster scenarios, where the drone with limited power acts as a relay to improve the downlink sum rate through rational resource allocation. The wireless channel model between drones and ground users in emergency communications is different from conventional relay networks, while drones have their coverage area and data rate limits. Considering these specific characteristics, we formulate a joint power and subcarrier allocation problem to maximize data rate of users, which is limited by the transmit power budget per drone and the number of users on each subcarrier in emergency communications. However, resource allocation in a unique drone assisted emergency communication system is a nondeterministic polynomial time (NP)-hard problem requiring brute force search, which has prohibitive computational complexity. Instead, efficient algorithms that provide a good trade-off between system performance and implementation practicality are needed. The contributions of this thesis are proposing two different resource allocation schemes. Both schemes divide users into high-priority(HP) users and low-priority(LP) users and both guarantee minimum guaranteed rate for HP users. The first scheme is an adaptive algorithm with low complexity. In this scheme, a suboptimal solution is proposed by dividing users into two priority groups: HP users (rescuers) and LP users (affected people). This procedure achieves quasi-linear complexity in terms of the number of users. Finally, the data of the brute force search method and this method were collected through simulation experiments. The data shows that the data rate of the proposed scheme was very close to the optimal data rate when there was a lack of resources. The second scheme is an adaptive algorithm. In the proposed scheme, we formulate a joint power and subcarrier allocation problem to maximize data rate of users, which is limited by the transmit power budget per drone and the number of users on each subcarrier in emergency communications. Due to the intractability of the formulated problem, it is decomposed into two sub-problems: power allocation optimisation and subcarrier allocation optimization. Then a joint resource allocation algorithm is proposed. The simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method is close to that of the optimal solution but with much lower complexity