Spatial networks with wireless applications

Many networks have nodes located in physical space, with links more common between closely spaced pairs of nodes. For example, the nodes could be wireless devices and links communication channels in a wireless mesh network. We describe recent work involving such networks, considering effects due to the geometry (convex,non-convex, and fractal), node distribution, distance-dependent link probability, mobility, directivity and interference.Comment: Review article- an amended version with a new title from the origina

Stochastic Geometry Modeling of Cellular Networks: Analysis, Simulation and Experimental Validation

Due to the increasing heterogeneity and deployment density of emerging cellular networks, new flexible and scalable approaches for their modeling, simulation, analysis and optimization are needed. Recently, a new approach has been proposed: it is based on the theory of point processes and it leverages tools from stochastic geometry for tractable system-level modeling, performance evaluation and optimization. In this paper, we investigate the accuracy of this emerging abstraction for modeling cellular networks, by explicitly taking realistic base station locations, building footprints, spatial blockages and antenna radiation patterns into account. More specifically, the base station locations and the building footprints are taken from two publicly available databases from the United Kingdom. Our study confirms that the abstraction model based on stochastic geometry is capable of accurately modeling the communication performance of cellular networks in dense urban environments.Comment: submitted for publicatio

Area Spectral Efficiency Analysis and Energy Consumption Minimization in Multi-Antenna Poisson Distributed Networks

This paper aims at answering two fundamental questions: how area spectral efficiency (ASE) behaves with different system parameters; how to design an energy-efficient network. Based on stochastic geometry, we obtain the expression and a tight lower-bound for ASE of Poisson distributed networks considering multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) transmission. With the help of the lower-bound, some interesting results are observed. These results are validated via numerical results for the original expression. We find that ASE can be viewed as a concave function with respect to the number of antennas and active users. For the purpose of maximizing ASE, we demonstrate that the optimal number of active users is a fixed portion of the number of antennas. With optimal number of active users, we observe that ASE increases linearly with the number of antennas. Another work of this paper is joint optimization of the base station (BS) density, the number of antennas and active users to minimize the network energy consumption. It is discovered that the optimal combination of the number of antennas and active users is the solution that maximizes the energy-efficiency. Besides the optimal algorithm, we propose a suboptimal algorithm to reduce the computational complexity, which can achieve near optimal performance.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Major Revisio

Power Beacon-Assisted Millimeter Wave Ad Hoc Networks

Deployment of low cost power beacons (PBs) is a promising solution for dedicated wireless power transfer (WPT) in future wireless networks. In this paper, we present a tractable model for PB-assisted millimeter wave (mmWave) wireless ad hoc networks, where each transmitter (TX) harvests energy from all PBs and then uses the harvested energy to transmit information to its desired receiver. Our model accounts for realistic aspects of WPT and mmWave transmissions, such as power circuit activation threshold, allowed maximum harvested power, maximum transmit power, beamforming and blockage. Using stochastic geometry, we obtain the Laplace transform of the aggregate received power at the TX to calculate the power coverage probability. We approximate and discretize the transmit power of each TX into a finite number of discrete power levels in log scale to compute the channel and total coverage probability. We compare our analytical predictions to simulations and observe good accuracy. The proposed model allows insights into effect of system parameters, such as transmit power of PBs, PB density, main lobe beam-width and power circuit activation threshold on the overall coverage probability. The results confirm that it is feasible and safe to power TXs in a mmWave ad hoc network using PBs.Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessibl