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

On the Performance of the Relay-ARQ Networks

This paper investigates the performance of relay networks in the presence of hybrid automatic repeat request (ARQ) feedback and adaptive power allocation. The throughput and the outage probability of different hybrid ARQ protocols are studied for independent and spatially-correlated fading channels. The results are obtained for the cases where there is a sum power constraint on the source and the relay or when each of the source and the relay are power-limited individually. With adaptive power allocation, the results demonstrate the efficiency of relay-ARQ techniques in different conditions.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 201

A cross layer multi hop network architecture for wireless Ad Hoc networks

In this paper, a novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative network architecture is presented. Our architecture involves the design of a simple yet efficient cooperative flooding scheme,two decentralized opportunistic cooperative forwarding mechanisms as well as the design of Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) protocol that spans and incorporates the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers for improving the performance of multihop communication. The proposed architecture exploits randomized coding at the physical layer to realize cooperative diversity. Randomized coding alleviates relay selection and actuation mechanisms,and therefore reduces the coordination among the relays. The coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, without communication among the relays and without establishing a prior route. In our architecture, routing layer functionality is submerged into the MAC layer to provide seamless cooperative communication while the messaging overhead to set up routes, select and actuate relays is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements, such as eight times higher throughput and ten times lower end-to-end delay as well as reduced overhead, as compared to networks based on well-known IEEE 802.11 and Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector (AODV) protocols

Optimizing HARQ and relay strategies in limited feedback communication systems

One of the key challenges for future communication systems is to deal with fast changing channels due to the mobility of users. Having a robust protocol capable of handling transmission failures in unfavorable channel conditions is crucial, but the feedback capacity may be greatly limited due to strict latency requirements. This paper studies the hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) techniques involved in re-transmissions when decoding failures occur at the receiver and proposes a scheme that relies on codeword bundling and adaptive incremental redundancy (IR) to maximize the overall throughput in a limited feedback system. In addition to the traditional codeword extension IR bits, this paper introduces a new type of IR, bundle parity bits, obtained from an erasure code across all the codewords in a bundle. The type and number of IR bits to be sent as a response to a decoding failure is optimized through a Markov Decision Process. In addition to the single link analysis, the paper studies how the same techniques generalize to relay and multi-user broadcast systems. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can provide a significant increase in throughput over traditional HARQ techniques

Whether and Where to Code in the Wireless Relay Channel

The throughput benefits of random linear network codes have been studied extensively for wirelined and wireless erasure networks. It is often assumed that all nodes within a network perform coding operations. In energy-constrained systems, however, coding subgraphs should be chosen to control the number of coding nodes while maintaining throughput. In this paper, we explore the strategic use of network coding in the wireless packet erasure relay channel according to both throughput and energy metrics. In the relay channel, a single source communicates to a single sink through the aid of a half-duplex relay. The fluid flow model is used to describe the case where both the source and the relay are coding, and Markov chain models are proposed to describe packet evolution if only the source or only the relay is coding. In addition to transmission energy, we take into account coding and reception energies. We show that coding at the relay alone while operating in a rateless fashion is neither throughput nor energy efficient. Given a set of system parameters, our analysis determines the optimal amount of time the relay should participate in the transmission, and where coding should be performed.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figures, to be published in the IEEE JSAC Special Issue on Theories and Methods for Advanced Wireless Relay

Communicating over Filter-and-Forward Relay Networks with Channel Output Feedback

Relay networks aid in increasing the rate of communication from source to destination. However, the capacity of even a three-terminal relay channel is an open problem. In this work, we propose a new lower bound for the capacity of the three-terminal relay channel with destination-to-source feedback in the presence of correlated noise. Our lower bound improves on the existing bounds in the literature. We then extend our lower bound to general relay network configurations using an arbitrary number of filter-and-forward relay nodes. Such network configurations are common in many multi-hop communication systems where the intermediate nodes can only perform minimal processing due to limited computational power. Simulation results show that significant improvements in the achievable rate can be obtained through our approach. We next derive a coding strategy (optimized using post processed signal-to-noise ratio as a criterion) for the three-terminal relay channel with noisy channel output feedback for two transmissions. This coding scheme can be used in conjunction with open-loop codes for applications like automatic repeat request (ARQ) or hybrid-ARQ.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Cooperative Jamming for Secure Communications in MIMO Relay Networks

Secure communications can be impeded by eavesdroppers in conventional relay systems. This paper proposes cooperative jamming strategies for two-hop relay networks where the eavesdropper can wiretap the relay channels in both hops. In these approaches, the normally inactive nodes in the relay network can be used as cooperative jamming sources to confuse the eavesdropper. Linear precoding schemes are investigated for two scenarios where single or multiple data streams are transmitted via a decode-and-forward (DF) relay, under the assumption that global channel state information (CSI) is available. For the case of single data stream transmission, we derive closed-form jamming beamformers and the corresponding optimal power allocation. Generalized singular value decomposition (GSVD)-based secure relaying schemes are proposed for the transmission of multiple data streams. The optimal power allocation is found for the GSVD relaying scheme via geometric programming. Based on this result, a GSVD-based cooperative jamming scheme is proposed that shows significant improvement in terms of secrecy rate compared to the approach without jamming. Furthermore, the case involving an eavesdropper with unknown CSI is also investigated in this paper. Simulation results show that the secrecy rate is dramatically increased when inactive nodes in the relay network participate in cooperative jamming.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs