352 research outputs found
Energy Efficient, Cooperative Communication in Low-Power Wireless Networks
The increased interest in massive deployment of wireless sensors and network densification requires more innovation in low-latency communication across multi-hop networks. Moreover, the resource constrained nature of sensor nodes calls for more energy efficient transmission protocols, in order to increase the battery life of said devices. Therefore, it is important to investigate possible technologies that would aid in improving energy efficiency and decreasing latency in wireless sensor networks (WSN) while focusing on application specific requirements. To this end, and based on state of the art Glossy, a low-power WSN flooding protocol, this dissertation introduces two energy efficient, cooperative transmission schemes for low-power communication in WSNs, with the aim of achieving performance gains in energy efficiency, latency and power consumption. These approaches apply several cooperative transmission technologies such as physical layer network coding and transmit beamforming. Moreover, mathematical tools such as convex optimization and game theory are used in order to analytically construct the proposed schemes. Then, system level simulations are performed, where the proposed schemes are evaluated based on different criteria.
First, in order to improve over all latency in the network as well as energy efficiency, MF-Glossy is proposed; a communication scheme that enables the simultaneous flooding of different packets from multiple sources to all nodes in the network. Using a communication-theoretic analysis, upper bounds on the performance of Glossy and MF-Glossy are determined. Further, simulation results show that MF-Glossy has the potential to achieve several-fold improvements in goodput and latency across a wide spectrum of network configurations at lower energy costs and comparable packet reception rates. Hardware implementation challenges are discussed as a step towards harnessing the potential of MF-Glossy in real networks, while focusing on key challenges and possible solutions.
Second, under the assumption of available channel state information (CSI) at all nodes, centralized and distributed beamforming and power control algorithms are proposed and their performance is evaluated. They are compared in terms of energy efficiency to standard Glossy. Numerical simulations demonstrate that a centralized power control scheme can achieve several-fold improvements in energy efficiency over Glossy across a wide spectrum of network configurations at comparable packet reception rates. Furthermore, the more realistic scenario where CSI is not available at transmitting nodes is considered. To battle CSI unavailability, cooperation is introduced on two stages. First, cooperation between receiving and transmitting nodes is proposed for the process of CSI acquisition, where the receivers provide the transmitters with quantized (e.g. imperfect) CSI. Then, cooperation within transmitting nodes is proposed for the process of multi-cast transmit beamforming. In addition to an analytical formulation of the robust multi-cast beamforming problem with imperfect CSI, its performance is evaluated, in terms of energy efficiency, through numerical simulations. It is shown that the level of cooperation, represented by the number of limited feedback bits from receivers to transmitters, greatly impacts energy efficiency. To this end, the optimization problem of finding the optimal number of feedback bits B is formulated, as a programming problem, under QoS constraints of 5% maximum outage. Numerical simulations show that there exists an optimal number of feedback bits that maximizes energy efficiency. Finally, the effect of choosing cooperating transmitters on energy efficiency is studied, where it is shown that an optimum group of cooperating transmit nodes, also known as a transmit coalition, can be formed in order to maximize energy efficiency. The investigated techniques including optimum feedback bits and transmit coalition formation can achieve a 100% increase in energy efficiency when compared to state of the art Glossy under same operation requirements in very dense networks.
In summary, the two main contributions in this dissertation provide insights on the possible performance gains that can be achieved when cooperative technologies are used in low-power wireless networks
Rate Splitting for MIMO Wireless Networks: A Promising PHY-Layer Strategy for LTE Evolution
MIMO processing plays a central part towards the recent increase in spectral
and energy efficiencies of wireless networks. MIMO has grown beyond the
original point-to-point channel and nowadays refers to a diverse range of
centralized and distributed deployments. The fundamental bottleneck towards
enormous spectral and energy efficiency benefits in multiuser MIMO networks
lies in a huge demand for accurate channel state information at the transmitter
(CSIT). This has become increasingly difficult to satisfy due to the increasing
number of antennas and access points in next generation wireless networks
relying on dense heterogeneous networks and transmitters equipped with a large
number of antennas. CSIT inaccuracy results in a multi-user interference
problem that is the primary bottleneck of MIMO wireless networks. Looking
backward, the problem has been to strive to apply techniques designed for
perfect CSIT to scenarios with imperfect CSIT. In this paper, we depart from
this conventional approach and introduce the readers to a promising strategy
based on rate-splitting. Rate-splitting relies on the transmission of common
and private messages and is shown to provide significant benefits in terms of
spectral and energy efficiencies, reliability and CSI feedback overhead
reduction over conventional strategies used in LTE-A and exclusively relying on
private message transmissions. Open problems, impact on standard specifications
and operational challenges are also discussed.Comment: accepted to IEEE Communication Magazine, special issue on LTE
Evolutio
Weighted Fair Multicast Multigroup Beamforming under Per-antenna Power Constraints
A multi-antenna transmitter that conveys independent sets of common data to
distinct groups of users is considered. This model is known as physical layer
multicasting to multiple co-channel groups. In this context, the practical
constraint of a maximum permitted power level radiated by each antenna is
addressed. The per-antenna power constrained system is optimized in a maximum
fairness sense with respect to predetermined quality of service weights. In
other words, the worst scaled user is boosted by maximizing its weighted
signal-to-interference plus noise ratio. A detailed solution to tackle the
weighted max-min fair multigroup multicast problem under per-antenna power
constraints is therefore derived. The implications of the novel constraints are
investigated via prominent applications and paradigms. What is more, robust
per-antenna constrained multigroup multicast beamforming solutions are
proposed. Finally, an extensive performance evaluation quantifies the gains of
the proposed algorithm over existing solutions and exhibits its accuracy over
per-antenna power constrained systems.Comment: Under review in IEEE Transactions in Signal Processin
Multiple Access in Aerial Networks: From Orthogonal and Non-Orthogonal to Rate-Splitting
Recently, interest on the utilization of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has
aroused. Specifically, UAVs can be used in cellular networks as aerial users
for delivery, surveillance, rescue search, or as an aerial base station (aBS)
for communication with ground users in remote uncovered areas or in dense
environments requiring prompt high capacity. Aiming to satisfy the high
requirements of wireless aerial networks, several multiple access techniques
have been investigated. In particular, space-division multiple access(SDMA) and
power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) present promising
multiplexing gains for aerial downlink and uplink. Nevertheless, these gains
are limited as they depend on the conditions of the environment. Hence, a
generalized scheme has been recently proposed, called rate-splitting multiple
access (RSMA), which is capable of achieving better spectral efficiency gains
compared to SDMA and NOMA. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of
key multiple access technologies adopted for aerial networks, where aBSs are
deployed to serve ground users. Since there have been only sporadic results
reported on the use of RSMA in aerial systems, we aim to extend the discussion
on this topic by modelling and analyzing the weighted sum-rate performance of a
two-user downlink network served by an RSMA-based aBS. Finally, related open
issues and future research directions are exposed.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE Journa
Coordinated Multicasting with Opportunistic User Selection in Multicell Wireless Systems
Physical layer multicasting with opportunistic user selection (OUS) is
examined for multicell multi-antenna wireless systems. By adopting a two-layer
encoding scheme, a rate-adaptive channel code is applied in each fading block
to enable successful decoding by a chosen subset of users (which varies over
different blocks) and an application layer erasure code is employed across
multiple blocks to ensure that every user is able to recover the message after
decoding successfully in a sufficient number of blocks. The transmit signal and
code-rate in each block determine opportunistically the subset of users that
are able to successfully decode and can be chosen to maximize the long-term
multicast efficiency. The employment of OUS not only helps avoid
rate-limitations caused by the user with the worst channel, but also helps
coordinate interference among different cells and multicast groups. In this
work, efficient algorithms are proposed for the design of the transmit
covariance matrices, the physical layer code-rates, and the target user subsets
in each block. In the single group scenario, the system parameters are
determined by maximizing the group-rate, defined as the physical layer
code-rate times the fraction of users that can successfully decode in each
block. In the multi-group scenario, the system parameters are determined by
considering a group-rate balancing optimization problem, which is solved by a
successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. To further reduce the feedback
overhead, we also consider the case where only part of the users feed back
their channel vectors in each block and propose a design based on the balancing
of the expected group-rates. In addition to SCA, a sample average approximation
technique is also introduced to handle the probabilistic terms arising in this
problem. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by computer
simulations.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin
Recent Advances in Joint Wireless Energy and Information Transfer
In this paper, we provide an overview of the recent advances in
microwave-enabled wireless energy transfer (WET) technologies and their
applications in wireless communications. Specifically, we divide our
discussions into three parts. First, we introduce the state-of-the-art WET
technologies and the signal processing techniques to maximize the energy
transfer efficiency. Then, we discuss an interesting paradigm named
simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), where energy and
information are jointly transmitted using the same radio waveform. At last, we
review the recent progress in wireless powered communication networks (WPCN),
where wireless devices communicate using the power harvested by means of WET.
Extensions and future directions are also discussed in each of these areas.Comment: Conference submission accepted by ITW 201
Content delivery over multi-antenna wireless networks
The past few decades have witnessed unprecedented advances in information technology, which have significantly shaped the way we acquire and process information in our daily lives. Wireless communications has become the main means of access to data through mobile devices, resulting in a continuous exponential growth in wireless data traffic, mainly driven by the demand for high quality content.
Various technologies have been proposed by researchers to tackle this growth in 5G and beyond, including the use of increasing number of antenna elements, integrated point-to-multipoint delivery and caching, which constitute the core of this thesis. In particular, we study non-orthogonal content delivery in multiuser multiple-input-single-output (MISO) systems. First, a joint beamforming strategy for simultaneous delivery of broadcast and unicast services is investigated, based on layered division multiplexing (LDM) as a means of superposition coding. The system performance in terms of minimum required power under prescribed quality-of-service (QoS) requirements is examined in comparison with time division multiplexing (TDM). It is demonstrated through simulations that the non-orthogonal delivery strategy based on LDM significantly outperforms the orthogonal strategy based on TDM in terms of system throughput and reliability. To facilitate efficient implementation of the LDM-based beamforming design, we further propose a dual decomposition-based distributed approach. Next, we study an efficient multicast beamforming design in cache-aided multiuser MISO systems, exploiting proactive content placement and coded delivery. It is observed that the complexity of this problem grows exponentially with the number of subfiles delivered to each user in each time slot, which itself grows exponentially with the number of users in the system. Therefore, we propose a low-complexity alternative through time-sharing that limits the number of subfiles that can be received by a user in each time slot. Moreover, a joint design of content delivery and multicast beamforming is proposed to further enhance the system performance, under the constraint on maximum number of subfiles each user can decode in each time slot. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Chapter 5, followed by an outlook for future works.Open Acces
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