Enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordination Challenges in Heterogeneous Networks

3GPP LTE-Advanced has started a new study item to investigate Heterogeneous Network (HetNet) deployments as a cost effective way to deal with the unrelenting traffic demand. HetNets consist of a mix of macrocells, remote radio heads, and low-power nodes such as picocells, femtocells, and relays. Leveraging network topology, increasing the proximity between the access network and the end-users, has the potential to provide the next significant performance leap in wireless networks, improving spatial spectrum reuse and enhancing indoor coverage. Nevertheless, deployment of a large number of small cells overlaying the macrocells is not without new technical challenges. In this article, we present the concept of heterogeneous networks and also describe the major technical challenges associated with such network architecture. We focus in particular on the standardization activities within the 3GPP related to enhanced inter-cell interference coordination.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures, 2 table

Solutions for wireless internet connectivity in remote and rural areas

Abstract. These days internet connectivity is listed in the basic needs of human habitat. Internet provides inevitable support in getting knowledge, professional and social connectivity, entertainment media, and in running majority of businesses. Human dependency on internet for efficient, proficient and time saving work has increased the demand of internet connectivity worldwide. The global index shows a percentage increase in internet users from 16% to 48% (of the world population) from 2005 to 2019. The users are accessing internet via different media, inclusive of fixed lines and wireless connectivity. In wireless connectivity by 2019, 86% of the world population is using mobile broadband services offered by different telecom operators in different regions. Around 44.7% of the world population lives in rural areas as projected in 2018. Telecom operators are now seeking to cover all urban and rural, segregated, and dense, plateaus and hills, small and big geographical areas for internet connectivity. The majority of challenges faced by operators for deployment of internet connectivity services are in rural areas. Internet users cited in rural areas experience poor coverage and bad quality of service (QoS) in wireless internet access. This thesis covers the rural area internet connectivity challenges, existing deployable solutions against the challenges, and provides example solutions to overcome these challenges, to provide wireless network coverage in rural areas of Finland. Many of the existing wireless communication services are directly deployable or adjustable to the remote or rural areas almost the same way as for the urban areas. The major challenge is the low annual revenue per unit and segregated population densities of rural areas, which increase the return of investment time of network service providers. There are other challenges like ease of assembly, technology, backhaul connectivity, and electricity discussed in the thesis. The possible wireless network solutions deployable for wide area network regions and local area network regions are presented in this thesis. Thesis presents all emerging wireless technologies like small cell base station, super tower, balloon Loon project, power line Airgig project, satellite Viasat service, fixed wireless internet, and signal booster. Two possible network solutions for wireless network coverage in rural areas of Finland are analysed in the thesis. Huawei’s RuralStar small cell base station is presented as the first network solution from the viewpoint of network service provider. Hajakaista network services to individual user are presented as the second network solution from the viewpoint of end user. An addition of outdoor router in Hajakaista network architecture is presented as an additional advantage of outdoor Wi-Fi service together with indoor Wi-Fi. The limitations of the network solutions and future work scope are discussed in the discussion part of the thesis.Langattomia tietoliikenneratkaisuja syrjäalueille. Tiivistelmä. Nykyisin internetyhteys nähdään perustarpeeksi koska se antaa pääsyn tietoon, mahdollistaa ammatilliset ja sosiaaliset yhteydet sekä toimii viihdeväylänä ja tärkeänä osana liiketoimintaa. Tämän vuoksi tarve internetyhteydelle on kasvanut maailmanlaajuisesti. Vuonna 2005 maailman ihmisistä 16 % oli yhteys internettiin ja 2019 48 %. Internetyhteys voidaan saada usealla eri tavalla kuten valokuidulla ja langatonta yhteyttä käyttäen. Vuonna 2019 maailman ihmisistä 86 % käytti langatonta tekniikkaa. Vuonna 2018 44,7 % ihmisistä asui maaseutualueilla. Teleoperaattorit yrittävät kattaa kaikki kaupunki- ja maaseutualueet; eristyneet, tasaiset, kukkulaiset, isot ja pienet maantieteelliset alueet. Suurimmat haasteet ovat maaseudulla, jossa ihmiset kokevat huonoa yhteyspeittoa ja yhteyden laatua. Tämä diplomityö tarkastelee, miten nykyisiä langattomia järjestelmiä voitaisiin käyttää maaseudulla toimivien yhteyksien luomiseksi. Työ esittää kaksi esimerkkiratkaisua Suomen olosuhteisiin. Monet nykyisin kaupungeissa käytettävät ratkaisut ovat suoraan tai lähes suoraan sovellettavissa maaseudulle. Päähaasteet ovat matala vuosittainen yksikkötuotto ja hajallaan olevat alueet, jotka syyt kasvattavat investoinnin kuoletusaikaa. Muita haasteita ovat asennus, teknologia, siirtoyhteydet (tukiasemasta verkkoon) ja sähkön saanti, joita tarkastellaan työssä. Mahdollisia langattomia ratkaisuja ovat laajan alueen ja paikalliset ratkaisut, kuten työssä tuodaan esille. Työ tarkastelee solukkoverkkoja, supertornia, palloprojekti Loonia, sähkölinjoihin pohjautuvaa Airgig-projektia, Viasat-satelliittiratkaisua, kiinteää solukkoyhteyttä ja signaalin passiivista vahvistamista. Työ esittää kaksi ratkaisumallia Suomen olosuhteisiin. Toinen perustuu Huawein RuralStar-kevyttukiasemaan, jolla voi jatkaa operaattorin verkkoa. Toinen ratkaisu on kuluttajalähtöinen ja se perustuu Hajakaista Oy:n ratkaisuun. Siinä lisätään Hajakaista Oy:n perusratkaisun eli talon sisäisen Wi-Fi-verkon rinnalle ulkoinen Wi-Fi-verkko. Ratkaisujen rajoitteita tarkastellaan työn keskusteluosuudessa

Open Access and the First Amendment: A Critique of Comcast Cablevision of Broward County, Inc. v. Broward County

To what extent does the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment bar the adoption of “open access” regulations? Open access (or “net neutrality”) refers to a policy that would require broadband Internet providers, such as cable and phone companies, to allow competitive Internet Service Providers (ISPs) onto their broadband lines at nondiscriminatory rates. A federal district court in Florida recently held Broward County’s open access ordinance unconstitutional on the grounds that it would force speech – in the form of Internet content – on to the local cable company. If the district court’s analysis is correct, then open access regulations are foreclosed by the Free Speech Clause. This article argues that open access regulations are, in fact, thoroughly consistent with the First Amendment. Broadband providers maintain the kind of “bottleneck” control over Internet content that justifies regulations aimed at facilitating the free flow of information. Broadband providers are already using their strategic position to interfere in the e-commerce and video-downloading markets, and they have the power to speed up or slow down the delivery of Web-pages and other Internet applications. By breaking the broadband provider’s bottleneck control over Internet content and applications, open access regulations serve the important government objectives of facilitating robust public discourse and free markets. The First Amendment does not stand in the way of this important policy proposal

The Rise of Innovation Districts: A New Geography of Innovation in America

As the United States slowly emerges from the great recession, a remarkable shify is occurring in the spatial geogrpahy of innovation. For the past 50 years, the landscape of innovation has been dominated by places like Silicon Valley - suburban corridors of spatially isolated corporate campuses, accessible only by car, with little emphasis on the quality of life or on integrating work, housing, and recreation. A new complementary urban model is now emerging, giving rise to what we and others are calling "innovation districts." These districts, by our definition, are geographic areas where leading-edge anchor institutions and companies cluster and connect with start-ups, business incubators, and accelerators. They are also physically compact, transit-accessible, and technicall

Cooperation Strategies for Enhanced Connectivity at Home

WHILE AT HOME , USERS MAY EXPERIENCE A POOR I NTERNET SERVICE while being connected to their 802.11 Access Points (APs). The AP is just one component of the Internet Gateway (GW) that generally includes a backhaul connection (ADSL, fiber,etc..) and a router providing a LAN. The root cause of performance degradation may be poor/congested wireless channel between the user and the GW or congested/bandwidth limited backhaul connection. The latter is a serious issue for DSL users that are located far from the central office because the greater the distance the lesser the achievable physical datarate. Furthermore, the GW is one of the few devices in the home that is left always on, resulting in energy waste and electromagnetic pollution increase. This thesis proposes two strategies to enhance Internet connectivity at home by (i) creating a wireless resource sharing scheme through the federation and the coordination of neighboring GWs in order to achieve energy efficiency while avoiding congestion, (ii) exploiting different king of connectivities, i.e., the wired plus the cellular (3G/4G) connections, through the aggregation of the available bandwidth across multiple access technologies. In order to achieve the aforementioned strategies we study and develop: • A viable interference estimation technique for 802.11 BSSes that can be implemented on commodity hardware at the MAC layer, without requiring active measurements, changes in the 802.11 standard, cooperation from the wireless stations (WSs). We extend previous theoretical results on the saturation throughput in order to quantify the impact in term of throughput loss of any kind of interferer. We im- plement and extensively evaluate our estimation technique with a real testbed and with different kind of interferer, achieving always good accuracy. • Two available bandwidth estimation algorithms for 802.11 BSSes that rely only on passive measurements and that account for different kind of interferers on the ISM band. This algorithms can be implemented on commodity hardware, as they require only software modifications. The first algorithm applies to intra-GW while the second one applies to inter-GW available bandwidth estimation. Indeed, we use the first algorithm to compute the metric for assessing the Wi-Fi load of a GW and the second one to compute the metric to decide whether accept incoming WSs from neighboring GWs or not. Note that in the latter case it is assumed that one or more WSs with known traffic profile are requested to relocate from one GW to another one. We evaluate both algorithms with simulation as well as with a real test-bed for different traffic patterns, achieving high precision. • A fully distributed and decentralized inter-access point protocol for federated GWs that allows to dynamically manage the associations of the wireless stations (WSs) in the federated network in order to achieve energy efficiency and offloading con- gested GWs, i.e, we keep a minimum number of GWs ON while avoiding to create congestion and real-time throughput loss. We evaluate this protocol in a federated scenario, using both simulation and a real test-bed, achieving up to 65% of energy saving in the simulated setting. We compare the energy saving achieved by our protocol against a centralized optimal scheme, obtaining close to optimal results. • An application level solution that accelerates slow ADSL connections with the parallel use of cellular (3G/4G) connections. We study the feasibility and the potential performance of this scheme at scale using both extensive throughput measurement of the cellular network and trace driven analysis. We validate our solution by implementing a real test bed and evaluating it “in the wild, at several residential locations of a major European city. We test two applications: Video-on-Demand (VoD) and picture upload, obtaining remarkable throughput increase for both applications at all locations. Our implementation features a multipath scheduler which we compare to other scheduling policies as well as to transport level solution like MTCP, obtaining always better results

Does Mobile Phone Usage Boost Productivity in Developing Countries?

The aim of this study is to assess the impact of mobile phone proliferation on productivity, using data from 73 low-income countries, from the period 2000-2016. The sample includes countries from Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Caribbean. The author\u27s findings show that holding all else constant, a 1 percent increase in mobile penetration rate boosts output per capita by 2.6 percent. These findings confirm there are increasing returns (network effects) to productivity associated with an increase in penetration rate. Results also show that the ease of doing business matters in low-income countries in that it influences the speed at which higher productivity is achieved