A Practical Cooperative Multicell MIMO-OFDMA Network Based on Rank Coordination

An important challenge of wireless networks is to boost the cell edge performance and enable multi-stream transmissions to cell edge users. Interference mitigation techniques relying on multiple antennas and coordination among cells are nowadays heavily studied in the literature. Typical strategies in OFDMA networks include coordinated scheduling, beamforming and power control. In this paper, we propose a novel and practical type of coordination for OFDMA downlink networks relying on multiple antennas at the transmitter and the receiver. The transmission ranks, i.e.\ the number of transmitted streams, and the user scheduling in all cells are jointly optimized in order to maximize a network utility function accounting for fairness among users. A distributed coordinated scheduler motivated by an interference pricing mechanism and relying on a master-slave architecture is introduced. The proposed scheme is operated based on the user report of a recommended rank for the interfering cells accounting for the receiver interference suppression capability. It incurs a very low feedback and backhaul overhead and enables efficient link adaptation. It is moreover robust to channel measurement errors and applicable to both open-loop and closed-loop MIMO operations. A 20% cell edge performance gain over uncoordinated LTE-A system is shown through system level simulations.Comment: IEEE Transactions or Wireless Communications, Accepted for Publicatio

INTERFERENCE MANAGEMENT IN LTE SYSTEM AND BEYOUND

The key challenges to high throughput in cellular wireless communication system are interference, mobility and bandwidth limitation. Mobility has never been a problem until recently, bandwidth has been constantly improved upon through the evolutions in cellular wireless communication system but interference has been a constant limitation to any improvement that may have resulted from such evolution. The fundamental challenge to a system designer or a researcher is how to achieve high data rate in motion (high speed) in a cellular system that is intrinsically interference-limited. Multi-antenna is the solution to data on the move and the capacity of multi-antenna system has been demonstrated to increase proportionally with increase in the number of antennas at both transmitter and receiver for point-to-point communications and multi-user environment. However, the capacity gain in both uplink and downlink is limited in a multi-user environment like cellular system by interference, the number of antennas at the base station, complexity and space constraint particularly for a mobile terminal. This challenge in the downlink provided the motivation to investigate successive interference cancellation (SIC) as an interference management tool LTE system and beyond. The Simulation revealed that ordered successive interference (OSIC) out performs non-ordered successive interference cancellation (NSIC) and the additional complexity is justified based on the associated gain in BER performance of OSIC. The major drawback of OSIC is that it is not efficient in network environment employing power control or power allocation. Additional interference management techniques will be required to fully manage the interference.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

A Distributed Approach to Interference Alignment in OFDM-based Two-tiered Networks

In this contribution, we consider a two-tiered network and focus on the coexistence between the two tiers at physical layer. We target our efforts on a long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) macro-cell sharing the spectrum with a randomly deployed second tier of small-cells. In such networks, high levels of co-channel interference between the macro and small base stations (MBS/SBS) may largely limit the potential spectral efficiency gains provided by the frequency reuse 1. To address this issue, we propose a novel cognitive interference alignment based scheme to protect the macro-cell from the cross-tier interference, while mitigating the co-tier interference in the second tier. Remarkably, only local channel state information (CSI) and autonomous operations are required in the second tier, resulting in a completely self-organizing approach for the SBSs. The optimal precoder that maximizes the spectral efficiency of the link between each SBS and its served user equipment is found by means of a distributed one-shot strategy. Numerical findings reveal non-negligible spectral efficiency enhancements with respect to traditional time division multiple access approaches at any signal to noise (SNR) regime. Additionally, the proposed technique exhibits significant robustness to channel estimation errors, achieving remarkable results for the imperfect CSI case and yielding consistent performance enhancements to the network.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, accepted and to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology Special Section: Self-Organizing Radio Networks, 2013. Authors' final version. Copyright transferred to IEE

D3.2 First performance results for multi -node/multi -antenna transmission technologies

This deliverable describes the current results of the multi-node/multi-antenna technologies investigated within METIS and analyses the interactions within and outside Work Package 3. Furthermore, it identifies the most promising technologies based on the current state of obtained results. This document provides a brief overview of the results in its first part. The second part, namely the Appendix, further details the results, describes the simulation alignment efforts conducted in the Work Package and the interaction of the Test Cases. The results described here show that the investigations conducted in Work Package 3 are maturing resulting in valuable innovative solutions for future 5G systems.Fantini. R.; Santos, A.; De Carvalho, E.; Rajatheva, N.; Popovski, P.; Baracca, P.; Aziz, D.... (2014). D3.2 First performance results for multi -node/multi -antenna transmission technologies. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/7675

Efficient Spectrum Management as an Enabler Towards 5G Cellular Systems

Advanced spectrum sharing and resource management techniques are needed in future wireless cellular networks to ensure high data rates to the end users. New system architec- tures will be required, taking into account aspects such as like spectrum resources availabil- ity, deployment and operational costs, as well as power consumption. Thus, it becomes key for the development of the fifth generation of cellular networks (5G) to pursue an efficient exploitation of the wireless medium, in the sense of both using advanced physical (PHY) layer techniques, and also seeking coordination among operators. In this thesis, we analyze the problem of spectrum management within the next generation of cellular networks and we propose new algorithms for spectrum sharing and for interference coordination. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the spectrum sharing between operators. Firstly, we develop a Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard compliant simulation environ- ment extending the open-source network simulator ns3 to support multi-input multi-output (MIMO) systems and advanced beamforming systems. Then, we present a mathematical analysis for the network performance of non-orthogonal spectrum sharing, connecting it directly with the statistics of the radio channel and we develop some spectrum sharing al- gorithms considering different aspects of the operators coexistence. The analysis is further extended to the performance evaluation of more complex digital beamforming techniques developed in a multi-input-single-output (MISO) system allowing to reach a Pareto equi- librium between the operators. Finally, we consider also an orthogonal spectrum sharing scenario investigating the impact of asymmetries and dynamics of the user demands on the implementation of spectrum sharing techniques. In the second part of the thesis, we extend the concept of spectrum management to two different scenarios. In the first scenario, we consider coordination between multiple cells, e.g. coordinated multipoint (CoMP). In particular, thanks to the exploitation of digital beamforming techniques, we present a novel distributed clustering algorithm that adapts the cluster configuration according to the users distribution and the average cluster size. In the second scenario, we extend the concept of spectrum sharing to the coexistence between different communications system in order to study the feasibility of the deployment of the cellular systems within the mmWave spectrum. In particular, we analyze the impact of the novel cellular networks on the fixed satellite system (FSS). In the last part of the thesis, we focus on the mobility management of the users in a het- erogeneous network. Firstly, we focus on the average performance experienced by a mobile user while crossing a pico/femtocell, as a function of the handover parameters to provide an approximate expression of the average Shannon capacity experienced by a mobile user when crossing the femtocell. Then, we propose a Markov-based framework to model the user state during the handover process and, based on such a model, we derive an optimal context-dependent handover criterion