Wireless Communications in the Era of Big Data

The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adaptable for managing the bigdata traffic in wireless networks. On the other hand, instead of viewing mobile bigdata as a unwanted burden, we introduce methods to capitalize from the vast data traffic, for building a bigdata-aware wireless network with better wireless service quality and new mobile applications. We highlight several promising future research directions for wireless communications in the mobile bigdata era.Comment: This article is accepted and to appear in IEEE Communications Magazin

Separation Framework: An Enabler for Cooperative and D2D Communication for Future 5G Networks

Soaring capacity and coverage demands dictate that future cellular networks need to soon migrate towards ultra-dense networks. However, network densification comes with a host of challenges that include compromised energy efficiency, complex interference management, cumbersome mobility management, burdensome signaling overheads and higher backhaul costs. Interestingly, most of the problems, that beleaguer network densification, stem from legacy networks' one common feature i.e., tight coupling between the control and data planes regardless of their degree of heterogeneity and cell density. Consequently, in wake of 5G, control and data planes separation architecture (SARC) has recently been conceived as a promising paradigm that has potential to address most of aforementioned challenges. In this article, we review various proposals that have been presented in literature so far to enable SARC. More specifically, we analyze how and to what degree various SARC proposals address the four main challenges in network densification namely: energy efficiency, system level capacity maximization, interference management and mobility management. We then focus on two salient features of future cellular networks that have not yet been adapted in legacy networks at wide scale and thus remain a hallmark of 5G, i.e., coordinated multipoint (CoMP), and device-to-device (D2D) communications. After providing necessary background on CoMP and D2D, we analyze how SARC can particularly act as a major enabler for CoMP and D2D in context of 5G. This article thus serves as both a tutorial as well as an up to date survey on SARC, CoMP and D2D. Most importantly, the article provides an extensive outlook of challenges and opportunities that lie at the crossroads of these three mutually entangled emerging technologies.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 201

A review on green caching strategies for next generation communication networks

© 2020 IEEE. In recent years, the ever-increasing demand for networking resources and energy, fueled by the unprecedented upsurge in Internet traffic, has been a cause for concern for many service providers. Content caching, which serves user requests locally, is deemed to be an enabling technology in addressing the challenges offered by the phenomenal growth in Internet traffic. Conventionally, content caching is considered as a viable solution to alleviate the backhaul pressure. However, recently, many studies have reported energy cost reductions contributed by content caching in cache-equipped networks. The hypothesis is that caching shortens content delivery distance and eventually achieves significant reduction in transmission energy consumption. This has motivated us to conduct this study and in this article, a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art green caching techniques is provided. This review paper extensively discusses contributions of the existing studies on green caching. In addition, the study explores different cache-equipped network types, solution methods, and application scenarios. We categorically present that the optimal selection of the caching nodes, smart resource management, popular content selection, and renewable energy integration can substantially improve energy efficiency of the cache-equipped systems. In addition, based on the comprehensive analysis, we also highlight some potential research ideas relevant to green content caching