Cooperative Caching and Transmission Design in Cluster-Centric Small Cell Networks

Wireless content caching in small cell networks (SCNs) has recently been considered as an efficient way to reduce the traffic and the energy consumption of the backhaul in emerging heterogeneous cellular networks (HetNets). In this paper, we consider a cluster-centric SCN with combined design of cooperative caching and transmission policy. Small base stations (SBSs) are grouped into disjoint clusters, in which in-cluster cache space is utilized as an entity. We propose a combined caching scheme where part of the available cache space is reserved for caching the most popular content in every SBS, while the remaining is used for cooperatively caching different partitions of the less popular content in different SBSs, as a means to increase local content diversity. Depending on the availability and placement of the requested content, coordinated multipoint (CoMP) technique with either joint transmission (JT) or parallel transmission (PT) is used to deliver content to the served user. Using Poisson point process (PPP) for the SBS location distribution and a hexagonal grid model for the clusters, we provide analytical results on the successful content delivery probability of both transmission schemes for a user located at the cluster center. Our analysis shows an inherent tradeoff between transmission diversity and content diversity in our combined caching-transmission design. We also study optimal cache space assignment for two objective functions: maximization of the cache service performance and the energy efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves performance gain by leveraging cache-level and signal-level cooperation and adapting to the network environment and user QoS requirements.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, submitted for possible journal publicatio

Cooperative Regions For Coded Cooperation Over Time-Varying Fading Channels

The performance analysis of coded cooperation has been mainly focused on two extreme cases of channel variability, i.e. the block-fading (BF) and the fast-fading (FF) model. In more practical propagation environments the fading correlation across time depends on the level of user mobility. This paper analyzes the effects of time-selective fading on the performance of coded cooperation by providing an analytical framework for the error rate evaluation as a function of the mobility degree of the mobile station (MS) and of the quality of the inter-MS channel. The purpose is to evaluate the conditions on the propagation settings where the additional exploitation of spatial diversity (when time-diversity is available) provided by cooperative transmission is able to enhance substantially the performance of the non-cooperative transmission. We show that coded cooperation can outperform the non-cooperative (coded and bit-interleaved) transmission only up to a certain degree of mobility. The cooperative region is defined as the collection of mobility settings for which coded cooperation can be regarded as a competitive strategy compared to non-cooperative transmission. Contrary to what has been previously shown for BF channels, we demonstrate that the inter-MS channel quality plays a key role in the definition of the cooperative region

Beacon-Assisted Spectrum Access with Cooperative Cognitive Transmitter and Receiver

Spectrum access is an important function of cognitive radios for detecting and utilizing spectrum holes without interfering with the legacy systems. In this paper we propose novel cooperative communication models and show how deploying such cooperations between a pair of secondary transmitter and receiver assists them in identifying spectrum opportunities more reliably. These cooperations are facilitated by dynamically and opportunistically assigning one of the secondary users as a relay to assist the other one which results in more efficient spectrum hole detection. Also, we investigate the impact of erroneous detection of spectrum holes and thereof missing communication opportunities on the capacity of the secondary channel. The capacity of the secondary users with interference-avoiding spectrum access is affected by 1) how effectively the availability of vacant spectrum is sensed by the secondary transmitter-receiver pair, and 2) how correlated are the perceptions of the secondary transmitter-receiver pair about network spectral activity. We show that both factors are improved by using the proposed cooperative protocols. One of the proposed protocols requires explicit information exchange in the network. Such information exchange in practice is prone to wireless channel errors (i.e., is imperfect) and costs bandwidth loss. We analyze the effects of such imperfect information exchange on the capacity as well as the effect of bandwidth cost on the achievable throughput. The protocols are also extended to multiuser secondary networks.Comment: 36 pages, 6 figures, To appear in IEEE Transaction on Mobile Computin

Slotted Aloha for Networked Base Stations

We study multiple base station, multi-access systems in which the user-base station adjacency is induced by geographical proximity. At each slot, each user transmits (is active) with a certain probability, independently of other users, and is heard by all base stations within the distance $r$. Both the users and base stations are placed uniformly at random over the (unit) area. We first consider a non-cooperative decoding where base stations work in isolation, but a user is decoded as soon as one of its nearby base stations reads a clean signal from it. We find the decoding probability and quantify the gains introduced by multiple base stations. Specifically, the peak throughput increases linearly with the number of base stations $m$ and is roughly $m/4$ larger than the throughput of a single-base station that uses standard slotted Aloha. Next, we propose a cooperative decoding, where the mutually close base stations inform each other whenever they decode a user inside their coverage overlap. At each base station, the messages received from the nearby stations help resolve collisions by the interference cancellation mechanism. Building from our exact formulas for the non-cooperative case, we provide a heuristic formula for the cooperative decoding probability that reflects well the actual performance. Finally, we demonstrate by simulation significant gains of cooperation with respect to the non-cooperative decoding.Comment: conference; submitted on Dec 15, 201

Exploiting Tradeoff Between Transmission Diversity and Content Diversity in Multi-Cell Edge Caching

Caching in multi-cell networks faces a well-known dilemma, i.e., to cache same contents among multiple edge nodes (ENs) to enable transmission cooperation/diversity for higher transmission efficiency, or to cache different contents to enable content diversity for higher cache hit rate. In this work, we introduce a partition-based caching to exploit the tradeoff between transmission diversity and content diversity in a multi-cell edge caching networks with single user only. The performance is characterized by the system average outage probability, which can be viewed as the sum of the cache hit outage probability and cache miss probability. We show that (i) In the low signal-to-noise ratio(SNR) region, the ENs are encouraged to cache more fractions of the most popular files so as to better exploit the transmission diversity for the most popular content; (ii) In the high SNR region, the ENs are encouraged to cache more files with less fractions of each so as to better exploit the content diversity.Comment: Accepted by IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC), Kansas City, MO, USA, May 201

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective