Multihop Diversity in Wideband OFDM Systems: The Impact of Spatial Reuse and Frequency Selectivity

The goal of this paper is to establish which practical routing schemes for wireless networks are most suitable for wideband systems in the power-limited regime, which is, for example, a practically relevant mode of operation for the analysis of ultrawideband (UWB) mesh networks. For this purpose, we study the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency (known as the power-bandwidth tradeoff) in a wideband linear multihop network in which transmissions employ orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation and are affected by quasi-static, frequency-selective fading. Considering open-loop (fixed-rate) and closed-loop (rate-adaptive) multihop relaying techniques, we characterize the impact of routing with spatial reuse on the statistical properties of the end-to-end conditional mutual information (conditioned on the specific values of the channel fading parameters and therefore treated as a random variable) and on the energy and spectral efficiency measures of the wideband regime. Our analysis particularly deals with the convergence of these end-to-end performance measures in the case of large number of hops, i.e., the phenomenon first observed in \cite{Oyman06b} and named as ``multihop diversity''. Our results demonstrate the realizability of the multihop diversity advantages in the case of routing with spatial reuse for wideband OFDM systems under wireless channel effects such as path-loss and quasi-static frequency-selective multipath fading.Comment: 6 pages, to be published in Proc. 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications (IEEE ISSSTA'08), Bologna, Ital

Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Content Placement in Cache-Enabled Sub-6 GHz and Millimeter-Wave Multi-antenna Dense Small Cell Networks

This paper studies the performance of cache-enabled dense small cell networks consisting of multi-antenna sub-6 GHz and millimeter-wave base stations. Different from the existing works which only consider a single antenna at each base station, the optimal content placement is unknown when the base stations have multiple antennas. We first derive the successful content delivery probability by accounting for the key channel features at sub-6 GHz and mmWave frequencies. The maximization of the successful content delivery probability is a challenging problem. To tackle it, we first propose a constrained cross-entropy algorithm which achieves the near-optimal solution with moderate complexity. We then develop another simple yet effective heuristic probabilistic content placement scheme, termed two-stair algorithm, which strikes a balance between caching the most popular contents and achieving content diversity. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of the constrained cross-entropy method and that the two-stair algorithm yields significantly better performance than only caching the most popular contents. The comparisons between the sub-6 GHz and mmWave systems reveal an interesting tradeoff between caching capacity and density for the mmWave system to achieve similar performance as the sub-6 GHz system.Comment: 14 pages; Accepted to appear in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication