Spatial Wireless Channel Prediction under Location Uncertainty

Spatial wireless channel prediction is important for future wireless networks, and in particular for proactive resource allocation at different layers of the protocol stack. Various sources of uncertainty must be accounted for during modeling and to provide robust predictions. We investigate two channel prediction frameworks, classical Gaussian processes (cGP) and uncertain Gaussian processes (uGP), and analyze the impact of location uncertainty during learning/training and prediction/testing, for scenarios where measurements uncertainty are dominated by large-scale fading. We observe that cGP generally fails both in terms of learning the channel parameters and in predicting the channel in the presence of location uncertainties.\textcolor{blue}{{} }In contrast, uGP explicitly considers the location uncertainty. Using simulated data, we show that uGP is able to learn and predict the wireless channel

Thirty Years of Machine Learning: The Road to Pareto-Optimal Wireless Networks

Future wireless networks have a substantial potential in terms of supporting a broad range of complex compelling applications both in military and civilian fields, where the users are able to enjoy high-rate, low-latency, low-cost and reliable information services. Achieving this ambitious goal requires new radio techniques for adaptive learning and intelligent decision making because of the complex heterogeneous nature of the network structures and wireless services. Machine learning (ML) algorithms have great success in supporting big data analytics, efficient parameter estimation and interactive decision making. Hence, in this article, we review the thirty-year history of ML by elaborating on supervised learning, unsupervised learning, reinforcement learning and deep learning. Furthermore, we investigate their employment in the compelling applications of wireless networks, including heterogeneous networks (HetNets), cognitive radios (CR), Internet of things (IoT), machine to machine networks (M2M), and so on. This article aims for assisting the readers in clarifying the motivation and methodology of the various ML algorithms, so as to invoke them for hitherto unexplored services as well as scenarios of future wireless networks.Comment: 46 pages, 22 fig

Fixed Rank Kriging for Cellular Coverage Analysis

Coverage planning and optimization is one of the most crucial tasks for a radio network operator. Efficient coverage optimization requires accurate coverage estimation. This estimation relies on geo-located field measurements which are gathered today during highly expensive drive tests (DT); and will be reported in the near future by users' mobile devices thanks to the 3GPP Minimizing Drive Tests (MDT) feature~\cite{3GPPproposal}. This feature consists in an automatic reporting of the radio measurements associated with the geographic location of the user's mobile device. Such a solution is still costly in terms of battery consumption and signaling overhead. Therefore, predicting the coverage on a location where no measurements are available remains a key and challenging task. This paper describes a powerful tool that gives an accurate coverage prediction on the whole area of interest: it builds a coverage map by spatially interpolating geo-located measurements using the Kriging technique. The paper focuses on the reduction of the computational complexity of the Kriging algorithm by applying Fixed Rank Kriging (FRK). The performance evaluation of the FRK algorithm both on simulated measurements and real field measurements shows a good trade-off between prediction efficiency and computational complexity. In order to go a step further towards the operational application of the proposed algorithm, a multicellular use-case is studied. Simulation results show a good performance in terms of coverage prediction and detection of the best serving cell

A survey on Human Mobility and its applications

Human Mobility has attracted attentions from different fields of studies such as epidemic modeling, traffic engineering, traffic prediction and urban planning. In this survey we review major characteristics of human mobility studies including from trajectory-based studies to studies using graph and network theory. In trajectory-based studies statistical measures such as jump length distribution and radius of gyration are analyzed in order to investigate how people move in their daily life, and if it is possible to model this individual movements and make prediction based on them. Using graph in mobility studies, helps to investigate the dynamic behavior of the system, such as diffusion and flow in the network and makes it easier to estimate how much one part of the network influences another by using metrics like centrality measures. We aim to study population flow in transportation networks using mobility data to derive models and patterns, and to develop new applications in predicting phenomena such as congestion. Human Mobility studies with the new generation of mobility data provided by cellular phone networks, arise new challenges such as data storing, data representation, data analysis and computation complexity. A comparative review of different data types used in current tools and applications of Human Mobility studies leads us to new approaches for dealing with mentioned challenges

Data-driven Flood Emulation: Speeding up Urban Flood Predictions by Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Computational complexity has been the bottleneck of applying physically-based simulations on large urban areas with high spatial resolution for efficient and systematic flooding analyses and risk assessments. To address this issue of long computational time, this paper proposes that the prediction of maximum water depth rasters can be considered as an image-to-image translation problem where the results are generated from input elevation rasters using the information learned from data rather than by conducting simulations, which can significantly accelerate the prediction process. The proposed approach was implemented by a deep convolutional neural network trained on flood simulation data of 18 designed hyetographs on three selected catchments. Multiple tests with both designed and real rainfall events were performed and the results show that the flood predictions by neural network uses only 0.5 % of time comparing with physically-based approaches, with promising accuracy and ability of generalizations. The proposed neural network can also potentially be applied to different but relevant problems including flood predictions for urban layout planning