Enhanced Machine Learning Techniques for Early HARQ Feedback Prediction in 5G

We investigate Early Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest (E-HARQ) feedback schemes enhanced by machine learning techniques as a path towards ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC). To this end, we propose machine learning methods to predict the outcome of the decoding process ahead of the end of the transmission. We discuss different input features and classification algorithms ranging from traditional methods to newly developed supervised autoencoders. These methods are evaluated based on their prospects of complying with the URLLC requirements of effective block error rates below $10^{-5}$ at small latency overheads. We provide realistic performance estimates in a system model incorporating scheduling effects to demonstrate the feasibility of E-HARQ across different signal-to-noise ratios, subcode lengths, channel conditions and system loads, and show the benefit over regular HARQ and existing E-HARQ schemes without machine learning.Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures; accepted versio

Performance Analysis of Early-HARQ for Finite Block-Length Packet Transmission

Traditional retransmission protocols require the receiver to decode the entire packet before sending feedback signals, which may not be a viable solution for ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (URLLC) as it may cause a significant delay. To address this issue, early hybrid automatic repeat request (E-HARQ) has been proposed as an alternative to reduce the processing time at the receiver and send the feedback signal as quickly as possible. In this work, we present a framework for analyzing the performance of ARQ protocols considering URLLC requirements for finite block-length packet transmission and use it to evaluate the performance of E-HARQ from an information theory perspective, comparing it to simple ARQ. The results show that this new class of retransmission protocols can significantly improve the performance of URLLC systems

Analysis of NOMA-Based Retransmission Schemes for Factory Automation Applications

New use cases and applications in factory automation scenarios impose demanding requirements for traditional industrial communications. In particular, latency and reliability are considered as some of the most representative Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that limit the technological choices addressing wireless communications. Indeed, there is a considerable research effort ongoing in the area of wireless systems, not only from academia, but also from companies, towards novel solutions that fit Industry 4.0 KPIs. A major limitation for traditional wireless architectures is related to the harsh nature of the industrial propagation channel. Accordingly, this paper addresses these challenges by studying the reliability and latency performance of the joint use of different retransmission schemes in combination with Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques. Two general retransmission schemes have been tested: time-based and spatial diversity-based retransmissions. An adaptive injection level NOMA solution has been combined with the retransmission schemes to improve the reliability of critical information. In all cases, a particular set of simulations has been carried out varying the main parameters, such as modulation, code rate and the injection level. Moreover, the impact of the number of transmitters in relation to the communication reliability has been analyzed. Results show that spatial diversity-based retransmissions overcome considerably the reliability obtained with time-domain retransmissions while maintaining assumable latency ratesThis work was supported in part by the Basque Government under Grant IT1234-19, in part by the PREDOC under Grant PRE_2020_2_0105, and in part by the Spanish Government through project PHANTOM (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE) under Grant RTI2018-099162-B-I0

Towards reliable communication in LTE-A connected heterogeneous machine to machine network

Machine to machine (M2M) communication is an emerging technology that enables heterogeneous devices to communicate with each other without human intervention and thus forming so-called Internet of Things (IoTs). Wireless cellular networks (WCNs) play a significant role in the successful deployment of M2M communication. Specially the ongoing massive deployment of long term evolution advanced (LTE-A) makes it possible to establish machine type communication (MTC) in most urban and remote areas, and by using LTE-A backhaul network, a seamless network communication is being established between MTC-devices and-applications. However, the extensive network coverage does not ensure a successful implementation of M2M communication in the LTE-A, and therefore there are still some challenges. Energy efficient reliable transmission is perhaps the most compelling demand for various M2M applications. Among the factors affecting reliability of M2M communication are the high endto-end delay and high bit error rate. The objective of the thesis is to provide reliable M2M communication in LTE-A network. In this aim, to alleviate the signalling congestion on air interface and efficient data aggregation we consider a cluster based architecture where the MTC devices are grouped into number of clusters and traffics are forwarded through some special nodes called cluster heads (CHs) to the base station (BS) using single or multi-hop transmissions. In many deployment scenarios, some machines are allowed to move and change their location in the deployment area with very low mobility. In practice, the performance of data transmission often degrades with the increase of distance between neighboring CHs. CH needs to be reselected in such cases. However, frequent re-selection of CHs results in counter effect on routing and reconfiguration of resource allocation associated with CH-dependent protocols. In addition, the link quality between a CH-CH and CH-BS are very often affected by various dynamic environmental factors such as heat and humidity, obstacles and RF interferences. Since CH aggregates the traffic from all cluster members, failure of the CH means that the full cluster will fail. Many solutions have been proposed to combat with error prone wireless channel such as automatic repeat request (ARQ) and multipath routing. Though the above mentioned techniques improve the communication reliability but intervene the communication efficiency. In the former scheme, the transmitter retransmits the whole packet even though the part of the packet has been received correctly and in the later one, the receiver may receive the same information from multiple paths; thus both techniques are bandwidth and energy inefficient. In addition, with retransmission, overall end to end delay may exceed the maximum allowable delay budget. Based on the aforementioned observations, we identify CH-to-CH channel is one of the bottlenecks to provide reliable communication in cluster based multihop M2M network and present a full solution to support fountain coded cooperative communications. Our solution covers many aspects from relay selection to cooperative formation to meet the user’s QoS requirements. In the first part of the thesis, we first design a rateless-coded-incremental-relay selection (RCIRS) algorithm based on greedy techniques to guarantee the required data rate with a minimum cost. After that, we develop fountain coded cooperative communication protocols to facilitate the data transmission between two neighbor CHs. In the second part, we propose joint network and fountain coding schemes for reliable communication. Through coupling channel coding and network coding simultaneously in the physical layer, joint network and fountain coding schemes efficiently exploit the redundancy of both codes and effectively combat the detrimental effect of fading conditions in wireless channels. In the proposed scheme, after correctly decoding the information from different sources, a relay node applies network and fountain coding on the received signals and then transmits to the destination in a single transmission. Therefore, the proposed schemes exploit the diversity and coding gain to improve the system performance. In the third part, we focus on the reliable uplink transmission between CHs and BS where CHs transmit to BS directly or with the help of the LTE-A relay nodes (RN). We investigate both type-I and type-II enhanced LTE-A networks and propose a set of joint network and fountain coding schemes to enhance the link robustness. Finally, the proposed solutions are evaluated through extensive numerical simulations and the numerical results are presented to provide a comparison with the related works found in the literature

Joint Activity Detection, Channel Estimation, and Data Decoding for Grant-free Massive Random Access

In the massive machine-type communication (mMTC) scenario, a large number of devices with sporadic traffic need to access the network on limited radio resources. While grant-free random access has emerged as a promising mechanism for massive access, its potential has not been fully unleashed. In particular, the common sparsity pattern in the received pilot and data signal has been ignored in most existing studies, and auxiliary information of channel decoding has not been utilized for user activity detection. This paper endeavors to develop advanced receivers in a holistic manner for joint activity detection, channel estimation, and data decoding. In particular, a turbo receiver based on the bilinear generalized approximate message passing (BiG-AMP) algorithm is developed. In this receiver, all the received symbols will be utilized to jointly estimate the channel state, user activity, and soft data symbols, which effectively exploits the common sparsity pattern. Meanwhile, the extrinsic information from the channel decoder will assist the joint channel estimation and data detection. To reduce the complexity, a low-cost side information-aided receiver is also proposed, where the channel decoder provides side information to update the estimates on whether a user is active or not. Simulation results show that the turbo receiver is able to reduce the activity detection, channel estimation, and data decoding errors effectively, while the side information-aided receiver notably outperforms the conventional method with a relatively low complexity

A STUDY OF LINEAR ERROR CORRECTING CODES

Since Shannon's ground-breaking work in 1948, there have been two main development streams of channel coding in approaching the limit of communication channels, namely classical coding theory which aims at designing codes with large minimum Hamming distance and probabilistic coding which places the emphasis on low complexity probabilistic decoding using long codes built from simple constituent codes. This work presents some further investigations in these two channel coding development streams. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes form a class of capacity-approaching codes with sparse parity-check matrix and low-complexity decoder Two novel methods of constructing algebraic binary LDPC codes are presented. These methods are based on the theory of cyclotomic cosets, idempotents and Mattson-Solomon polynomials, and are complementary to each other. The two methods generate in addition to some new cyclic iteratively decodable codes, the well-known Euclidean and projective geometry codes. Their extension to non binary fields is shown to be straightforward. These algebraic cyclic LDPC codes, for short block lengths, converge considerably well under iterative decoding. It is also shown that for some of these codes, maximum likelihood performance may be achieved by a modified belief propagation decoder which uses a different subset of 7^ codewords of the dual code for each iteration. Following a property of the revolving-door combination generator, multi-threaded minimum Hamming distance computation algorithms are developed. Using these algorithms, the previously unknown, minimum Hamming distance of the quadratic residue code for prime 199 has been evaluated. In addition, the highest minimum Hamming distance attainable by all binary cyclic codes of odd lengths from 129 to 189 has been determined, and as many as 901 new binary linear codes which have higher minimum Hamming distance than the previously considered best known linear code have been found. It is shown that by exploiting the structure of circulant matrices, the number of codewords required, to compute the minimum Hamming distance and the number of codewords of a given Hamming weight of binary double-circulant codes based on primes, may be reduced. A means of independently verifying the exhaustively computed number of codewords of a given Hamming weight of these double-circulant codes is developed and in coiyunction with this, it is proved that some published results are incorrect and the correct weight spectra are presented. Moreover, it is shown that it is possible to estimate the minimum Hamming distance of this family of prime-based double-circulant codes. It is shown that linear codes may be efficiently decoded using the incremental correlation Dorsch algorithm. By extending this algorithm, a list decoder is derived and a novel, CRC-less error detection mechanism that offers much better throughput and performance than the conventional ORG scheme is described. Using the same method it is shown that the performance of conventional CRC scheme may be considerably enhanced. Error detection is an integral part of an incremental redundancy communications system and it is shown that sequences of good error correction codes, suitable for use in incremental redundancy communications systems may be obtained using the Constructions X and XX. Examples are given and their performances presented in comparison to conventional CRC schemes

Potentzia domeinuko NOMA 5G sareetarako eta haratago

Tesis inglés 268 p. -- Tesis euskera 274 p.During the last decade, the amount of data carried over wireless networks has grown exponentially. Several reasons have led to this situation, but the most influential ones are the massive deployment of devices connected to the network and the constant evolution in the services offered. In this context, 5G targets the correct implementation of every application integrated into the use cases. Nevertheless, the biggest challenge to make ITU-R defined cases (eMBB, URLLC and mMTC) a reality is the improvement in spectral efficiency. Therefore, in this thesis, a combination of two mechanisms is proposed to improve spectral efficiency: Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) techniques and Radio Resource Management (RRM) schemes. Specifically, NOMA transmits simultaneously several layered data flows so that the whole bandwidth is used throughout the entire time to deliver more than one service simultaneously. Then, RRM schemes provide efficient management and distribution of radio resources among network users. Although NOMA techniques and RRM schemes can be very advantageous in all use cases, this thesis focuses on making contributions in eMBB and URLLC environments and proposing solutions to communications that are expected to be relevant in 6G

Subcode-Based Early HARQ for 5G

Tactile Internet (TI) constitutes one of the major use cases for the development of the fifth generation (5G) mobile specification. TI services put high demand on the latency and reliability requirement, which is covered in the ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) discussion in 5G standardization. Hybrid Automatic Repeat Request (HARQ) is used in LTE to achieve high robustness in an efficient way with the cost of introducing additional latency. In this paper, we propose a new early HARQ scheme based on LDPC subcodes (SC E- HARQ), which enables to provide faster feedback and thus an earlier retransmission. The SC E-HARQ technique makes use of substructures in LDPC codes to start feedback calculation already on partially received codewords. This paper investigates the performance of SC E-HARQ in comparison with a second E-HARQ scheme based on log-likelihood ratio (LLR) estimation. The results show that SC E-HARQ achieves a comparable reliability to regular HARQ. In SNR regions relevant for URLLC, it clearly outperforms also the LLR-based E-HARQ in means of reliability as well as latency. Sub-millisecond latency with a total block error rate (BLER) of less than 10 -4 is attained in TDL-C by allowing 1% false negative retransmissions