Hybrid satellite–terrestrial networks toward 6G : key technologies and open issues

Future wireless networks will be required to provide more wireless services at higher data rates and with global coverage. However, existing homogeneous wireless networks, such as cellular and satellite networks, may not be able to meet such requirements individually, especially in remote terrain, including seas and mountains. One possible solution is to use diversified wireless networks that can exploit the inter-connectivity between satellites, aerial base stations (BSs), and terrestrial BSs over inter-connected space, ground, and aerial networks. Hence, enabling wireless communication in one integrated network has attracted both the industry and the research fraternities. In this work, we provide a comprehensive survey of the most recent work on hybrid satellite–terrestrial networks (HSTNs), focusing on system architecture, performance analysis, design optimization, and secure communication schemes for different cooperative and cognitive HSTN network architectures. Different key technologies are compared. Based on this comparison, several open issues for future research are discussed

Relaying in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

The deployment of relays between Internet of Things (IoT) end devices and gateways can improve link quality. In cellular-based IoT, relays have the potential to reduce base station overload. The energy expended in single-hop long-range communication can be reduced if relays listen to transmissions of end devices and forward these observations to gateways. However, incorporating relays into IoT networks faces some challenges. IoT end devices are designed primarily for uplink communication of small-sized observations toward the network; hence, opportunistically using end devices as relays needs a redesign of both the medium access control (MAC) layer protocol of such end devices and possible addition of new communication interfaces. Additionally, the wake-up time of IoT end devices needs to be synchronized with that of the relays. For cellular-based IoT, the possibility of using infrastructure relays exists, and noncellular IoT networks can leverage the presence of mobile devices for relaying, for example, in remote healthcare. However, the latter presents problems of incentivizing relay participation and managing the mobility of relays. Furthermore, although relays can increase the lifetime of IoT networks, deploying relays implies the need for additional batteries to power them. This can erode the energy efficiency gain that relays offer. Therefore, designing relay-assisted IoT networks that provide acceptable trade-offs is key, and this goes beyond adding an extra transmit RF chain to a relay-enabled IoT end device. There has been increasing research interest in IoT relaying, as demonstrated in the available literature. Works that consider these issues are surveyed in this paper to provide insight into the state of the art, provide design insights for network designers and motivate future research directions

Design and Performance Analysis of Efficient Cooperative Wireless Communication Systems

Cooperative communication has recently become a key technology for modern wireless networks such as 3GPP long-term evolution and WiMAX, because in such networks the transmission rate, the communication reliability, and coverage problems could be improved in a cost-effective manner. This, however, faces many design challenges. First, cooperative transmission typically involves a relaying phase which requires extra resources. This may cause a reduction in the spectral efficiency. Second, extra control signaling increases the complexity of operation, which may limit practical implementation. In addition, a wireless channel is time-varying, mainly due to the multipath propagation. As a result, a careful design of efficient cooperative communication systems is required, not only to enhance the spectral efficiency and maintain the quality-of-service (QoS), but also to be practical. In this dissertation, we aim to address the challenges imposed by cooperative communication and wireless transmission, and design the efficient and distributed systems which can be practically implemented in existing wireless systems. The research work is divided into two main topics: 1) adaptive cooperative wireless systems with variable-rate transmission, and 2) cooperative wireless systems with a power consumption constraint. The first topic investigates how the spectral efficiency of cooperative wireless communication systems can be improved while maintaining the QoS in terms of bit error rate and outage probability. The spectral efficiency enhancement is achieved by using three techniques: adaptivity over the relay node (i.e., relay node is active or not), adaptivity over the modulation mode, and relay selection. Based on that, we propose several adaptive cooperative schemes for both the decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols. To evaluate these schemes, we provide performance analysis in terms of average spectral efficiency, average bit error rate (ABER), and outage probability over Rayleigh fading channels. We start with the single-relay cooperative system using DF protocol, in which two adaptive cooperative schemes with variable-rate transmission are proposed. The first scheme, called the minimum error rate scheme (MERS), aims to exploit the transmit diversity to improve the bit error rate. By trading the multiplexing gain against the diversity gain, we propose the second scheme, called the maximum spectral efficiency scheme (MSES), in which cooperative transmission is avoided whenever it is not beneficial. The MERS improves the ABER significantly and achieves equal or better average spectral efficiency compared to the fixed (i.e., non-adaptive) relaying scheme. In contrast, the MSES provides the best average spectral efficiency due to its ability to not only adapt to the channel variation but also to switch between cooperative and non-cooperative transmissions. To further increase the spectral efficiency, we then propose the third scheme, called variable-rate based relay selection (VRRS) scheme, in which a relay node is selected from among the available relay nodes, based on a predefined criterion. Furthermore, we propose two AF adaptive cooperative schemes, mainly to enhance the spectral efficiency. In the first scheme, we introduce a generalized switching policy (GSP) for a single-relay cooperative wireless system that exploits the variable-rate transmission and useful cooperative regions. The second scheme, called the AF efficient relay selection (AFERS) scheme, extends the GSP to also consider the relay selection technique. Analytical and simulation results verify that the AFERS scheme not only outperforms conventional direct transmission in terms of the average spectral efficiency, but also the AF fixed relaying and the outage-based AF adaptive cooperative scheme. The second topic investigates the fair power consumption of the relay nodes for AF cooperative wireless communication systems. The fairness is defined as to achieve equal power consumption over the relay nodes. We focus on how the relay selection process can be controlled in a distributed manner so that the power consumption of the relay nodes can be included in relay selection. We first introduce a simple closed-form expression for the weight coefficient used in order to achieve the considered fairness that depends only on the local average channel conditions of the relay path. We then derive closed-form expressions of the weighted outage probability and ABER and show that our proposed strategy not only has less complexity than the conventional centralized one but also provides better accuracy in distributing the total consumed power equally among the relay nodes without affecting the performance

Opportunities and Challenges in OFDMA-Based Cellular Relay Networks: A Radio Resource Management Perspective

The opportunities and flexibility in relay networks and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) make the combination a suitable candidate network and air-interface technology for providing reliable and ubiquitous high-data-r

Full-duplex wireless communications: challenges, solutions and future research directions

The family of conventional half-duplex (HD) wireless systems relied on transmitting and receiving in different time-slots or frequency sub-bands. Hence the wireless research community aspires to conceive full-duplex (FD) operation for supporting concurrent transmission and reception in a single time/frequency channel, which would improve the attainable spectral efficiency by a factor of two. The main challenge encountered in implementing an FD wireless device is the large power difference between the self-interference (SI) imposed by the device’s own transmissions and the signal of interest received from a remote source. In this survey, we present a comprehensive list of the potential FD techniques and highlight their pros and cons. We classify the SI cancellation techniques into three categories, namely passive suppression, analog cancellation and digital cancellation, with the advantages and disadvantages of each technique compared. Specifically, we analyse the main impairments (e.g. phase noise, power amplifier nonlinearity as well as in-phase and quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalance, etc.) that degrading the SI cancellation. We then discuss the FD based Media Access Control (MAC)-layer protocol design for the sake of addressing some of the critical issues, such as the problem of hidden terminals, the resultant end-to-end delay and the high packet loss ratio (PLR) due to network congestion. After elaborating on a variety of physical/MAC-layer techniques, we discuss potential solutions conceived for meeting the challenges imposed by the aforementioned techniques. Furthermore, we also discuss a range of critical issues related to the implementation, performance enhancement and optimization of FD systems, including important topics such as hybrid FD/HD scheme, optimal relay selection and optimal power allocation, etc. Finally, a variety of new directions and open problems associated with FD technology are pointed out. Our hope is that this treatise will stimulate future research efforts in the emerging field of FD communication

D13.3 Overall assessment of selected techniques on energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications

Deliverable D13.3 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the outcome of the Joint Research Activities (JRA) of WP1.3 in the last year of the Newcom# project. The activities focus on the investigation of bandwidth and energy efficient techniques for current and emerging wireless systems. The JRAs are categorized in three Tasks: (i) the first deals with techniques for power efficiency and minimization at the transceiver and network level; (ii) the second deals with the handling of interference by appropriate low interference transmission techniques; (iii) the third is concentrated on Radio Resource Management (RRM) and Interference Management (IM) in selected scenarios, including HetNets and multi-tier networks.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version