Resource Allocation in Uplink Long Term Evolution

One of the most crucial goals of future cellular systems is to minimize transmission power while increasing system performance. This master thesis work presents two channel-queue-aware scheduling schemes to allocate channels among active users in uplink LTE. Transmission power, packet delays and data rates are three of the most important criteria critically affecting the resource allocation designs. Therefore, each of these two scheduling algorithms proposes a practical method that assigns resources in such a way so as to optimally maximize data rate and minimize transmission power and packet delays while ensuring the QoS requirements. After converting the resource allocation problem into an optimization problem, the objective function and associated constraints are derived. Due to the contiguity constraint, which is imposed by SC-FDMA in uplink LTE, binary integer programming is employed to solve the optimization problem. Also the heuristic algorithms that approximate optimal schemes are presented to decrease the algorithm complexity

THROUGHPUT OPTIMIZATION AND ENERGY EFFICIENCY OF THE DOWNLINK IN THE LTE SYSTEM

Nowadays, the usage of smart phones is very popular. More and more people access the Internet with their smart phones. This demands higher data rates from the mobile network operators. Every year the number of users and the amount of information is increasing dramatically. The wireless technology should ensure high data rates to be able to compete with the wire-based technology. The main advantage of the wireless system is the ability for user to be mobile. The 4G LTE system made it possible to gain very high peak data rates. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the improvement of the system performance for the downlink based on different antenna configurations and different scheduling algorithms. Moreover, the fairness between the users using different schedulers has been analyzed and evaluated. Furthermore, the energy efficiency of the scheduling algorithms in the downlink of LTE systems has been considered. Some important parts of the LTE system are described in the theoretical part of this thesis.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Long Term Evolution-Advanced and Future Machine-to-Machine Communication

Long Term Evolution (LTE) has adopted Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA) as the downlink and uplink transmission schemes respectively. Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning is one of the primary objectives of wireless network operators. In LTE-Advanced (LTE-A), several additional new features such as Carrier Aggregation (CA) and Relay Nodes (RNs) have been introduced by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). These features have been designed to deal with the ever increasing demands for higher data rates and spectral efficiency. The RN is a low power and low cost device designed for extending the coverage and enhancing spectral efficiency, especially at the cell edge. Wireless networks are facing a new challenge emerging on the horizon, the expected surge of the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) traffic in cellular and mobile networks. The costs and sizes of the M2M devices with integrated sensors, network interfaces and enhanced power capabilities have decreased significantly in recent years. Therefore, it is anticipated that M2M devices might outnumber conventional mobile devices in the near future. 3GPP standards like LTE-A have primarily been developed for broadband data services with mobility support. However, M2M applications are mostly based on narrowband traffic. These standards may not achieve overall spectrum and cost efficiency if they are utilized for serving the M2M applications. The main goal of this thesis is to take the advantage of the low cost, low power and small size of RNs for integrating M2M traffic into LTE-A networks. A new RN design is presented for aggregating and multiplexing M2M traffic at the RN before transmission over the air interface (Un interface) to the base station called eNodeB. The data packets of the M2M devices are sent to the RN over the Uu interface. Packets from different devices are aggregated at the Packet Data Convergence Protocol (PDCP) layer of the Donor eNodeB (DeNB) into a single large IP packet instead of several small IP packets. Therefore, the amount of overhead data can be significantly reduced. The proposed concept has been developed in the LTE-A network simulator to illustrate the benefits and advantages of the M2M traffic aggregation and multiplexing at the RN. The potential gains of RNs such as coverage enhancement, multiplexing gain, end-to-end delay performance etc. are illustrated with help of simulation results. The results indicate that the proposed concept improves the performance of the LTE-A network with M2M traffic. The adverse impact of M2M traffic on regular LTE-A traffic such as voice and file transfer is minimized. Furthermore, the cell edge throughput and QoS performance are enhanced. Moreover, the results are validated with the help of an analytical model

Efficient Scheduling Algorithms for Wireless Resource Allocation and Virtualization in Wireless Networks

The continuing growth in demand for better mobile broadband experiences has motivated rapid development of radio-access technologies to support high data rates and improve quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) for mobile users. However, the modern radio-access technologies pose new challenges to mobile network operators (MNO) and wireless device designers such as reducing the total cost of ownership while supporting high data throughput per user, and extending battery life-per-charge of the mobile devices. In this thesis, a variety of optimization techniques aimed at providing innovative solutions for such challenges are explored. The thesis is divided into two parts. In the first part, the challenge of extending battery life-per-charge is addressed. Optimal and suboptimal power-efficient schedulers that minimize the total transmit power and meet the QoS requirements of the users are presented. The second outlines the benefits and challenges of deploying wireless resource virtualization (WRV) concept as a promising solution for satisfying the growing demand for mobile data and reducing capital and operational costs. First, a WRV framework is proposed for single cell zone that is able to centralize and share the spectrum resources between multiple MNOs. Consequently, several WRV frameworks are proposed, which virtualize the spectrum resource of the entire network for cloud radio access network (C-RAN)- one of the front runners for the next generation network architecture. The main contributions of this thesis are in designing optimal and suboptimal solutions for the aforementioned challenges. In most cases, the optimal solutions suffer from high complexity, and therefore low-complexity suboptimal solutions are provided for practical systems. The optimal solutions are used as benchmarks for evaluating the suboptimal solutions. The results prove that the proposed solutions effectively contribute in addressing the challenges caused by the demand for high data rates and power transmission in mobile networks

Information Technology

The new millennium has been labeled as the century of the personal communications revolution or more specifically, the digital wireless communications revolution. The introduction of new multimedia services has created higher loads on available radio resources. These services can be presented in different levels of quality of service. Namely, the task of the radio resource manager is to provide these levels. Radio resources are scarce and need to be shared by many users. The sharing has to be carried out in an efficient way avoiding as much as possible any waste of resources. The main contribution focus of this work is on radio resource management in opportunistic systems. In opportunistic communications dynamic rate and power allocation may be performed over the dimensions of time, frequency and space in a wireless system. In this work a number of these allocation schemes are proposed. A downlink scheduler is introduced in this work that controls the activity of the users. The scheduler is a simple integral controller that controls the activity of users, increasing or decreasing it depending on the degree of proximity to a requested quality of service level. The scheduler is designed to be a best effort scheduler; that is, in the event the requested quality of service (QoS) cannot be attained, users are always guaranteed the basic QoS level provided by a proportional fair scheduler. In a proportional fair scheduler, the user with the best rate quality factor is selected. The rate quality here is the instantaneous achievable rate divided by the average throughput Uplink scheduling is more challenging than its downlink counterpart due to signalling restrictions and additional constraints on resource allocations. For instance, in long term evolution systems, single carrier FDMA is to be utilized which requires the frequency domain resource allocation to be done in such a way that a user could only be allocated subsequent bands. We suggest for the uplink a scheduler that follows a heuristic approach in its decision. The scheduler is mainly based on the gradient algorithm that maximizes the gradient of a certain utility. The utility could be a function of any QoS. In addition, an optimal uplink scheduler for the same system is presented. This optimal scheduler is valid in theory only, nevertheless, it provides a considerable benchmark for evaluation of performance for the heuristic scheduler as well as other algorithms of the same system. A study is also made for the feedback information in a multi-carrier system. In a multi-carrier system, reporting the channel state information (CSI) of every subcarrier will result in huge overhead and consequent waste in bandwidth. In this work the subcarriers are grouped into subbands which are in turn grouped into blocks and a study is made to find the minimum amount of information for the adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) of the blocks. The thesis also deals with admission control and proposes an opportunistic admission controller. The controller gradually integrates a new user requesting admission into the system. The system is probed to examine the effect of the new user on existing connections. The user is finally fully admitted if by the end of the probing, the quality of service (QoS) of existing connections did not drop below a certain threshold. It is imperative to mention that the research work of this thesis is mainly focused on non-real time applications.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Admission control and resource allocation for LTE uplink systems

Long Term Evolution (LTE) radio technologies aim not only to increase the capacity of mobile telephone networks, but also to provide high throughput, low latency, an improved end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) and a simple architecture. The Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) has defined Single Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) as the access technique for the uplink and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) for the downlink. It is well known that scheduling and admission control play an important role for QoS provisioning, and that they are strongly related. Knowing that we can take full advantage of this property we can design an admission control mechanism that uses the design criterion of the scheduling scheme. In this thesis, we developed two new algorithms for handling single-class resource allocation and two algorithms for handling multi-class resource allocation, as well as a new admission control scheme for handling multi-class Grade of Service (GoS) and QoS in uplink LTE systems. We also present a combined solution that uses the resource allocation and the admission control properties to satisfy the GoS and QoS requirements. System performance is evaluated using simulations. Numerical results show that the proposed scheduling algorithms can handle multi-class QoS in LTE uplink systems with a little increase in complexity, and can be used in conjunction with admission control to meet the LTE requirements. In addition, the proposed admission control algorithm gain for the most sensitive traffic can be increased without sacrificing the overall system capacity. At the same time, guaranteeing GoS and maintaining the basic QoS requirements for all the admitted requests