5G Wireless Network Slicing for eMBB, URLLC, and mMTC: A Communication-Theoretic View

The grand objective of 5G wireless technology is to support three generic services with vastly heterogeneous requirements: enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communications (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). Service heterogeneity can be accommodated by network slicing, through which each service is allocated resources to provide performance guarantees and isolation from the other services. Slicing of the Radio Access Network (RAN) is typically done by means of orthogonal resource allocation among the services. This work studies the potential advantages of allowing for non-orthogonal sharing of RAN resources in uplink communications from a set of eMBB, mMTC and URLLC devices to a common base station. The approach is referred to as Heterogeneous Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (H-NOMA), in contrast to the conventional NOMA techniques that involve users with homogeneous requirements and hence can be investigated through a standard multiple access channel. The study devises a communication-theoretic model that accounts for the heterogeneous requirements and characteristics of the three services. The concept of reliability diversity is introduced as a design principle that leverages the different reliability requirements across the services in order to ensure performance guarantees with non-orthogonal RAN slicing. This study reveals that H-NOMA can lead, in some regimes, to significant gains in terms of performance trade-offs among the three generic services as compared to orthogonal slicing.Comment: Submitted to IEE

Massive MIMO for Internet of Things (IoT) Connectivity

Massive MIMO is considered to be one of the key technologies in the emerging 5G systems, but also a concept applicable to other wireless systems. Exploiting the large number of degrees of freedom (DoFs) of massive MIMO essential for achieving high spectral efficiency, high data rates and extreme spatial multiplexing of densely distributed users. On the one hand, the benefits of applying massive MIMO for broadband communication are well known and there has been a large body of research on designing communication schemes to support high rates. On the other hand, using massive MIMO for Internet-of-Things (IoT) is still a developing topic, as IoT connectivity has requirements and constraints that are significantly different from the broadband connections. In this paper we investigate the applicability of massive MIMO to IoT connectivity. Specifically, we treat the two generic types of IoT connections envisioned in 5G: massive machine-type communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC). This paper fills this important gap by identifying the opportunities and challenges in exploiting massive MIMO for IoT connectivity. We provide insights into the trade-offs that emerge when massive MIMO is applied to mMTC or URLLC and present a number of suitable communication schemes. The discussion continues to the questions of network slicing of the wireless resources and the use of massive MIMO to simultaneously support IoT connections with very heterogeneous requirements. The main conclusion is that massive MIMO can bring benefits to the scenarios with IoT connectivity, but it requires tight integration of the physical-layer techniques with the protocol design.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

5G framework for automated network adaptation in mission critical services

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Mission Critical Services (MCS) are gaining interest among network operators to offer alternative communications than conventional trunked radio systems. They promise a simplified management of cloud and radio resources for service deployment. However, the network capabilities should be adapted for the changing conditions, to assure low-latency and reliability for such applications. This paper presents an on-going work on utilising 5G technology for Mission Critical Push To Talk (MCPTT) services. It describes some design elements and evaluates 5G ESSENCE architecture that enable mission critical applications.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

NOMA based resource allocation and mobility enhancement framework for IoT in next generation cellular networks

With the unprecedented technological advances witnessed in the last two decades, more devices are connected to the internet, forming what is called internet of things (IoT). IoT devices with heterogeneous characteristics and quality of experience (QoE) requirements may engage in dynamic spectrum market due to scarcity of radio resources. We propose a framework to efficiently quantify and supply radio resources to the IoT devices by developing intelligent systems. The primary goal of the paper is to study the characteristics of the next generation of cellular networks with non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enable connectivity to clustered IoT devices. First, we demonstrate how the distribution and QoE requirements of IoT devices impact the required number of radio resources in real time. Second, we prove that using an extended auction algorithm by implementing a series of complementary functions, enhance the radio resource utilization efficiency. The results show substantial reduction in the number of sub-carriers required when compared to conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) and the intelligent clustering is scalable and adaptable to the cellular environment. Ability to move spectrum usages from one cluster to other clusters after borrowing when a cluster has less user or move out of the boundary is another soft feature that contributes to the reported radio resource utilization efficiency. Moreover, the proposed framework provides IoT service providers cost estimation to control their spectrum acquisition to achieve required quality of service (QoS) with guaranteed bit rate (GBR) and non-guaranteed bit rate (Non-GBR)

On the use of prioritization and network slicing features for mission critical and commercial traffic multiplexing in 5G Radio Access Networks

© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The Public Protection and Disaster Relief (PPDR) sector is undergoing an important transition with the deployment of Mission Critical (MC) mobile broadband technology based on 3GPP standards, with multiple initiatives on-going worldwide for providing PPDR agencies with broadband communications capabilities. One common approach being adopted is the delivery of MC services together with commercial traffic over public mobile networks and the use of prioritization mechanisms to protect the MC connections in congestion situations. However, this approach leaves commercial traffic unprotected in front of a noncontrolled surge of MC traffic in specific cells since all resources would be allocated to serve this traffic. In this context, this paper proposes a solution to properly multiplex MC and commercial services with congestion protection for both types of services. The solution is based on the exploitation of the network slicing features brought into the new 5G standards. In particular, the paper describes how different slices can be parameterized in a 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) so that radio load guarantees can be established for each type of service. The proposed solution is evaluated in an illustrative scenario by means of simulations. Obtained results show the improvements in traffic isolation achievable by the slicing configuration when compared to the solution that only relies on prioritization mechanismsPeer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft