Cognitive and Energy Harvesting-Based D2D Communication in Cellular Networks: Stochastic Geometry Modeling and Analysis

While cognitive radio enables spectrum-efficient wireless communication, radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting from ambient interference is an enabler for energy-efficient wireless communication. In this paper, we model and analyze cognitive and energy harvesting-based D2D communication in cellular networks. The cognitive D2D transmitters harvest energy from ambient interference and use one of the channels allocated to cellular users (in uplink or downlink), which is referred to as the D2D channel, to communicate with the corresponding receivers. We investigate two spectrum access policies for cellular communication in the uplink or downlink, namely, random spectrum access (RSA) policy and prioritized spectrum access (PSA) policy. In RSA, any of the available channels including the channel used by the D2D transmitters can be selected randomly for cellular communication, while in PSA the D2D channel is used only when all of the other channels are occupied. A D2D transmitter can communicate successfully with its receiver only when it harvests enough energy to perform channel inversion toward the receiver, the D2D channel is free, and the $\mathsf{SINR}$ at the receiver is above the required threshold; otherwise, an outage occurs for the D2D communication. We use tools from stochastic geometry to evaluate the performance of the proposed communication system model with general path-loss exponent in terms of outage probability for D2D and cellular users. We show that energy harvesting can be a reliable alternative to power cognitive D2D transmitters while achieving acceptable performance. Under the same $\mathsf{SINR}$ outage requirements as for the non-cognitive case, cognitive channel access improves the outage probability for D2D users for both the spectrum access policies.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Communications, to appea

Stochastic Geometry for Modeling, Analysis and Design of Future Wireless Networks

This thesis focuses on the modeling, analysis and design of future wireless networks with smart devices, i.e., devices with intelligence and ability to communicate with one another with/without the control of base stations (BSs). Using stochastic geometry, we develop realistic yet tractable frameworks to model and analyze the performance of such networks, while incorporating the intelligence features of smart devices. In the first half of the thesis, we develop stochastic geometry tools to study arbitrarily shaped network regions. Current techniques in the literature assume the network regions to be infinite, while practical network regions tend to be arbitrary. Two well-known networks are considered, where devices have the ability to: (i) communicate with others without the control of BSs (i.e., ad-hoc networks), and (ii) opportunistically access spectrum (i.e., cognitive networks). First, we propose a general algorithm to derive the distribution of the distance between the reference node and a random node inside an arbitrarily shaped ad-hoc network region, which helps to compute the outage probability. We then study the impact of boundary effects and show that the outage probability in infinite regions may not be a meaningful bound for arbitrarily shaped regions. By extending the developed techniques, we further analyze the performance of underlay cognitive networks, where different secondary users (SUs) activity protocols are employed to limit the interference at a primary user. Leveraging the information exchange among SUs, we propose a cooperation-based protocol. We show that, in the short-term sensing scenario, this protocol improves the network's performance compared to the existing threshold-based protocol. In the second half of the thesis, we study two recently emerged networks, where devices have the ability to: (i) communicate directly with nearby devices under the control of BSs (i.e., device-to-device (D2D) communication), and (ii) harvest radio frequency energy (i.e., energy harvesting networks). We first analyze the intra-cell interference in a finite cellular region underlaid with D2D communication, by incorporating a mode selection scheme to reduce the interference. We derive the outage probability at the BS and a D2D receiver, and propose a spectrum reuse ratio metric to assess the overall D2D communication performance. We demonstrate that, without impairing the performance at the BS, if the path-loss exponent on cellular link is slightly lower than that on D2D link, the spectrum reuse ratio can have negligible decrease while the average number of successful D2D transmissions increases with the increasing D2D node density. This indicates that an increasing level of D2D communication is beneficial in future networks. Then we study an ad-hoc network with simultaneous wireless information and power transfer in an infinite region, where transmitters are wirelessly charged by power beacons. We formulate the total outage probability in terms of the power and channel outage probabilities. The former incorporates a power activation threshold at transmitters, which is a key practical factor that has been largely ignored in previous work. We show that, although increasing power beacon's density or transmit power is not always beneficial for channel outage probability, it improves the overall network performance

Radio Resource Management for Cellular Networks Enhanced by Inter-User Communication

The importance of radio resource management will be more and more emphasized in future wireless communication systems. For fair penetration of wireless services and for improved local services, inter-user communication has been receiving wide attention as it opens up various possibilities for user cooperation. The capability of inter-user communication imposes higher demands on radio resource management as additional considerations are needed. The demands for intelligent management of radio resources is also emphasized by the sparsity of radio resources. As the available spectral resources are assessed as under-utilized, much effort is devoted to developing advanced resource management methods for improving the spectral usage efficiency. The research of this thesis has contributed to the radio resource management for cellular networks enhanced by inter-user communication. Recognizing that inter-user communication can be used for message relaying or for direct communication purposes, two use cases are considered that leverage the synergy of users: cooperative relay selection and Device-to-Device (D2D) communication. We identify the importance of stochastic geometry consideration on cellular users for evaluating system performance in cooperative networking. We develop an algorithm for efficiently selecting cooperative users to maximize an End-to-End (e2e) performance metric. We analyze the optimal resource sharing problem between D2D communication and infrastructure-supported communication. We study the impact of imperfect Channel State Information (CSI) on the performance of systems with inter-user communication. Simulation results show that the performance of users with unfavorable propagation conditions can be improved with cooperative communication in a multi-cell cellular environment, at the expense of radio resources. Further, our results show that the selection of multiple cooperative users is beneficial in cases where the candidate cooperative users are spatially distributed. For resource sharing between the D2D and infrastructure-supported communication, our results show that the proposed resource sharing scheme enables higher intra-cell resource reuse without blocking the infrastructure-supported communication

Enabling Cyber-Physical Communication in 5G Cellular Networks: Challenges, Solutions and Applications

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are expected to revolutionize the world through a myriad of applications in health-care, disaster event applications, environmental management, vehicular networks, industrial automation, and so on. The continuous explosive increase in wireless data traffic, driven by the global rise of smartphones, tablets, video streaming, and online social networking applications along with the anticipated wide massive sensors deployments, will create a set of challenges to network providers, especially that future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks will help facilitate the enabling of CPS communications over current network infrastructure. In this dissertation, we first provide an overview of CPS taxonomy along with its challenges from energy efficiency, security, and reliability. Then we present different tractable analytical solutions through different 5G technologies, such as device-to-device (D2D) communications, cell shrinking and offloading, in order to enable CPS traffic over cellular networks. These technologies also provide CPS with several benefits such as ubiquitous coverage, global connectivity, reliability and security. By tuning specific network parameters, the proposed solutions allow the achievement of balance and fairness in spectral efficiency and minimum achievable throughout among cellular users and CPS devices. To conclude, we present a CPS mobile-health application as a case study where security of the medical health cyber-physical space is discussed in details

Power allocation in a QoS-aware cellular-based vehicular communication system.

Masters Degree. University of KwaZulu- Natal, Durban.The task of a driver assistance system is to monitor the surrounding environment of a vehicle and provide an appropriate response in the case of detecting any hazardous condition. Such operation requires real-time processing of a large amount of information, which is gathered by a variety of sensors. Vehicular communication in future vehicles can pave the way for designing highly efficient and cost-effective driver assistance systems based on collaborative and remote processing solutions. The main transmission links of vehicular communication systems are vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I). In this research, a cellular-based vehicular communication system is proposed where Device-to-device (D2D) communication links are considered for establishing V2V links, and cellular communication links are employed for V2I links. D2D communication is one of the enablers of the next generation of cellular networks for improving spectrum and power utilization. D2D communication allows direct communication between user equipments within a cellular system. Nevertheless, implementing D2D communication should not defect nearby ongoing communication services. As a result, interference management is a significant aspect of designing D2D communication systems. Communication links in a cellular network are supposed to support a required level of data rates. The capacity of a communication channel is directly proportional to the energy of a transmitted signal, and in fact, achieving the desired level of Quality of Service (QoS) requires careful control of transmission power for all the radio sources within a system. Among different methods that are recommended for D2D communications, in-band D2D can offer better control over power transmission sources. In an underlay in-band D2D communication system, D2D user equipments (DUEs) usually reuse the cellular uplink (UL) spectrum. In such a system, the level of interference can effectively be managed by controlling the level of power that is transmitted by user equipments. To effectively perform the interference management, knowledge of the channel state information is required. However, as a result of the distributed nature of DUEs, such information is not fully attainable in a practical D2D system. Therefore, statistical methods are employed to find boundaries on the allocated transmission powers for achieving sufficient spectral efficiencies in V2I and V2V links without considering any prior knowledge on vehicles’ locations or the channel state information. Furthermore, the concepts of massive multiple-input multiple-output and underlay D2D communication sharing the uplink spectrum of a cellular system are used to minimize the interference effect

Recent Advances in Cellular D2D Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communications have attracted a great deal of attention from researchers in recent years. It is a promising technique for offloading local traffic from cellular base stations by allowing local devices, in physical proximity, to communicate directly with each other. Furthermore, through relaying, D2D is also a promising approach to enhancing service coverage at cell edges or in black spots. However, there are many challenges to realizing the full benefits of D2D. For one, minimizing the interference between legacy cellular and D2D users operating in underlay mode is still an active research issue. With the 5th generation (5G) communication systems expected to be the main data carrier for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) paradigm, the potential role of D2D and its scalability to support massive IoT devices and their machine-centric (as opposed to human-centric) communications need to be investigated. New challenges have also arisen from new enabling technologies for D2D communications, such as non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and blockchain technologies, which call for new solutions to be proposed. This edited book presents a collection of ten chapters, including one review and nine original research works on addressing many of the aforementioned challenges and beyond

Opportunistic Spectrum Utilization for Vehicular Communication Networks

Recently, vehicular networks (VANETs), has become the key technology of the next-generation intelligent transportation systems (ITS). By incorporating wireless communication and networking capabilities into automobiles, information can be efficiently and reliably disseminated among vehicles, road side units, and infrastructure, which enables a number of novel applications enhancing the road safety and providing the drivers/passengers with an information-rich environment. With the development of mobile Internet, people want to enjoy the Internet access in vehicles just as anywhere else. This fact, along with the soaring number of connected vehicles and the emerging data-craving applications and services, has led to a problem of spectrum scarcity, as the current spectrum bands for VANETs are difficult to accommodate the increasing mobile data demands. In this thesis, we aim to solve this problem by utilizing extra spectrum bands, which are not originally allocated for vehicular communications. In this case, the spectrum usage is based on an opportunistic manner, where the spectrum is not available if the primary system is active, or the vehicle is outside the service coverage due to the high mobility. We will analyze the features of such opportunistic spectrum, and design efficient protocols to utilize the spectrum for VANETs. Firstly, the application of cognitive radio technologies in VANETs, termed CR-VANETs, is proposed and analyzed. In CR-VANETs, the channel availability is severely affected by the street patterns and the mobility features of vehicles. Therefore, we theoretically analyze the channel availability in urban scenario, and obtain its statistics. Based on the knowledge of channel availability, an efficient channel access scheme for CR-VANETs is then designed and evaluated. Secondly, using WiFi to deliver mobile data, named WiFi offloading, is employed to deliver the mobile data on the road, in order to relieve the burden of the cellular networks, and provide vehicular users with a cost-effective data pipe. Using queueing theory, we analyze the offloading performance with respect to the vehicle mobility model and the users' QoS preferences. Thirdly, we employ device-to-device (D2D) communications in VANETs to further improve the spectrum efficiency. In a vehicular D2D (V-D2D) underlaying cellular network, proximate vehicles can directly communicate with each other with a relatively small transmit power, rather than traversing the base station. Therefore, many current transmissions can co-exist on one spectrum resource block. By utilizing the spatial diversity, the spectrum utilization is greatly enhanced. We study the performance of the V-D2D underlaying cellular network, considering the vehicle mobility and the street pattern. We also investigate the impact of the preference of D2D/cellular mode on the interference and network throughput, and obtain the theoretical results. In summary, the analysis and schemes developed in this thesis are useful to understand the future VANETs with heterogeneous access technologies, and provide important guidelines for designing and deploying such networks

Non-convex Optimization for Resource Allocation in Wireless Device-to-Device Communications

Device-to-device (D2D) communication is considered one of the key frameworks to provide suitable solutions for the exponentially increasing data tra c in mobile telecommunications. In this PhD Thesis, we focus on the resource allocation for underlay D2D communications which often results in a non-convex optimization problem that is computationally demanding. We have also reviewed many of the works on D2D underlay communications and identi ed some of the limitations that were not handled previously, which has motivated our works in this Thesis. Our rst works focus on the joint power allocation and channel assignment problem in the D2D underlay communication scenario for a unicast single-input and single-output (SISO) cellular network in either uplink or downlink spectrums. These works also consider several degrees of uncertainty in the channel state information (CSI), and propose suitable measures to guarantee the quality of service (QoS) and reliability under those conditions. Moreover, we also present a few algorithms that can be used to jointly assign uplink and downlink spectrum to D2D pairs. We also provide methods to decentralize those algorithms with convergence guarantees and analyze their computational complexity. We also consider both cases with no interference among D2D pairs and cases with interference among D2D pairs. Additionally, we propose the formulation of an optimization objective function that combines the network rate with a penalty function that penalizes unfair channel allocations where most of the channels are assigned to only a few D2D pairs. The next contributions of this Thesis focus on extending the previous works to cellular networks with multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) capabilities and networks with D2D multicast groups. We also present several methods to accommodate various degrees of uncertainty in the CSI and also guarantee di erent measures of QoS and reliability. All our algorithms are evaluated extensively through extensive numerical experiments using the Matlab simulation environment. All of these results show favorable performance, as compared to the existing state-of-the-art alternatives.publishedVersio