3,671 research outputs found
Advanced Coordinated Beamforming for the Downlink of Future LTE Cellular Networks
Modern cellular networks in traditional frequency bands are notoriously
interference-limited especially in urban areas, where base stations are
deployed in close proximity to one another. The latest releases of Long Term
Evolution (LTE) incorporate features for coordinating downlink transmissions as
an efficient means of managing interference. Recent field trial results and
theoretical studies of the performance of joint transmission (JT) coordinated
multi-point (CoMP) schemes revealed, however, that their gains are not as high
as initially expected, despite the large coordination overhead. These schemes
are known to be very sensitive to defects in synchronization or information
exchange between coordinating bases stations as well as uncoordinated
interference. In this article, we review recent advanced coordinated
beamforming (CB) schemes as alternatives, requiring less overhead than JT CoMP
while achieving good performance in realistic conditions. By stipulating that,
in certain LTE scenarios of increasing interest, uncoordinated interference
constitutes a major factor in the performance of CoMP techniques at large, we
hereby assess the resilience of the state-of-the-art CB to uncoordinated
interference. We also describe how these techniques can leverage the latest
specifications of current cellular networks, and how they may perform when we
consider standardized feedback and coordination. This allows us to identify
some key roadblocks and research directions to address as LTE evolves towards
the future of mobile communications.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IEEE Communications Magazin
A Novel Beamformed Control Channel Design for LTE with Full Dimension-MIMO
The Full Dimension-MIMO (FD-MIMO) technology is capable of achieving huge
improvements in network throughput with simultaneous connectivity of a large
number of mobile wireless devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Internet
of Things (IoT). In FD-MIMO, with a large number of antennae at the base
station and the ability to perform beamforming, the capacity of the physical
downlink shared channel (PDSCH) has increased a lot. However, the current
specifications of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not allow
the base station to perform beamforming techniques for the physical downlink
control channel (PDCCH), and hence, PDCCH has neither the capacity nor the
coverage of PDSCH. Therefore, PDCCH capacity will still limit the performance
of a network as it dictates the number of users that can be scheduled at a
given time instant. In Release 11, 3GPP introduced enhanced PDCCH (EPDCCH) to
increase the PDCCH capacity at the cost of sacrificing the PDSCH resources. The
problem of enhancing the PDCCH capacity within the available control channel
resources has not been addressed yet in the literature. Hence, in this paper,
we propose a novel beamformed PDCCH (BF-PDCCH) design which is aligned to the
3GPP specifications and requires simple software changes at the base station.
We rely on the sounding reference signals transmitted in the uplink to decide
the best beam for a user and ingeniously schedule the users in PDCCH. We
perform system level simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed
design and show that the proposed BF-PDCCH achieves larger network throughput
when compared with the current state of art algorithms, PDCCH and EPDCCH
schemes
Quantifying Potential Energy Efficiency Gain in Green Cellular Wireless Networks
Conventional cellular wireless networks were designed with the purpose of
providing high throughput for the user and high capacity for the service
provider, without any provisions of energy efficiency. As a result, these
networks have an enormous Carbon footprint. In this paper, we describe the
sources of the inefficiencies in such networks. First we present results of the
studies on how much Carbon footprint such networks generate. We also discuss
how much more mobile traffic is expected to increase so that this Carbon
footprint will even increase tremendously more. We then discuss specific
sources of inefficiency and potential sources of improvement at the physical
layer as well as at higher layers of the communication protocol hierarchy. In
particular, considering that most of the energy inefficiency in cellular
wireless networks is at the base stations, we discuss multi-tier networks and
point to the potential of exploiting mobility patterns in order to use base
station energy judiciously. We then investigate potential methods to reduce
this inefficiency and quantify their individual contributions. By a
consideration of the combination of all potential gains, we conclude that an
improvement in energy consumption in cellular wireless networks by two orders
of magnitude, or even more, is possible.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1210.843
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