LTE-Advanced radio access enhancements: A survey

Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-Advanced) is the next step in LTE evolution and allows operators to improve network performance and service capabilities through smooth deployment of new techniques and technologies. LTE-Advanced uses some new features on top of the existing LTE standards to provide better user experience and higher throughputs. Some of the most significant features introduced in LTE-Advanced are carrier aggregation, enhancements in heterogeneous networks, coordinated multipoint transmission and reception, enhanced multiple input multiple output usage and deployment of relay nodes in the radio network. Mentioned features are mainly aimed to enhance the radio access part of the cellular networks. This survey article presents an overview of the key radio access features and functionalities of the LTE-Advanced radio access network, supported by the simulation results. We also provide a detailed review of the literature together with a very rich list of the references for each of the features. An LTE-Advanced roadmap and the latest updates and trends in LTE markets are also presented

Cognitive Orthogonal Precoder for Two-tiered Networks Deployment

In this work, the problem of cross-tier interference in a two-tiered (macro-cell and cognitive small-cells) network, under the complete spectrum sharing paradigm, is studied. A new orthogonal precoder transmit scheme for the small base stations, called multi-user Vandermonde-subspace frequency division multiplexing (MU-VFDM), is proposed. MU-VFDM allows several cognitive small base stations to coexist with legacy macro-cell receivers, by nulling the small- to macro-cell cross-tier interference, without any cooperation between the two tiers. This cleverly designed cascaded precoder structure, not only cancels the cross-tier interference, but avoids the co-tier interference for the small-cell network. The achievable sum-rate of the small-cell network, satisfying the interference cancelation requirements, is evaluated for perfect and imperfect channel state information at the transmitter. Simulation results for the cascaded MU-VFDM precoder show a comparable performance to that of state-of-the-art dirty paper coding technique, for the case of a dense cellular layout. Finally, a comparison between MU-VFDM and a standard complete spectrum separation strategy is proposed. Promising gains in terms of achievable sum-rate are shown for the two-tiered network w.r.t. the traditional bandwidth management approach.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, accepted and to appear in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications: Cognitive Radio Series, 2013. Copyright transferred to IEE

Efficient radio resource management for future generation heterogeneous wireless networks

The heterogeneous deployment of small cells (e.g., femtocells) in the coverage area of the traditional macrocells is a cost-efficient solution to provide network capacity, indoor coverage and green communications towards sustainable environments in the future fifth generation (5G) wireless networks. However, the unplanned and ultra-dense deployment of femtocells with their uncoordinated operations will result in technical challenges such as severe interference, a significant increase in total energy consumption, unfairness in radio resource sharing and inadequate quality of service provisioning. Therefore, there is a need to develop efficient radio resource management algorithms that will address the above-mentioned technical challenges. The aim of this thesis is to develop and evaluate new efficient radio resource management algorithms that will be implemented in cognitive radio enabled femtocells to guarantee the economical sustainability of broadband wireless communications and users' quality of service in terms of throughput and fairness. Cognitive Radio (CR) technology with the Dynamic Spectrum Access (DSA) and stochastic process are the key technologies utilized in this research to increase the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency at limited interference. This thesis essentially investigates three research issues relating to the efficient radio resource management: Firstly, a self-organizing radio resource management algorithm for radio resource allocation and interference management is proposed. The algorithm considers the effect of imperfect spectrum sensing in detecting the available transmission opportunities to maximize the throughput of femtocell users while keeping interference below pre-determined thresholds and ensuring fairness in radio resource sharing among users. Secondly, the effect of maximizing the energy efficiency and the spectrum efficiency individually on radio resource management is investigated. Then, an energy-efficient radio resource management algorithm and a spectrum-efficient radio resource management algorithm are proposed for green communication, to improve the probabilities of spectrum access and further increase the network capacity for sustainable environments. Also, a joint maximization of the energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency of the overall networks is considered since joint optimization of energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency is one of the goals of 5G wireless networks. Unfortunately, maximizing the energy efficiency results in low performance of the spectrum efficiency and vice versa. Therefore, there is an investigation on how to balance the trade-off that arises when maximizing both the energy efficiency and the spectrum efficiency simultaneously. Hence, a joint energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency trade-off algorithm is proposed for radio resource allocation in ultra-dense heterogeneous networks based on orthogonal frequency division multiple access. Lastly, a joint radio resource allocation with adaptive modulation and coding scheme is proposed to minimize the total transmit power across femtocells by considering the location and the service requirements of each user in the network. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated by simulation and numerical analysis to demonstrate the impact of ultra-dense deployment of femtocells on the macrocell networks. The results show that the proposed algorithms offer improved performance in terms of throughput, fairness, power control, spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency. Also, the proposed algorithms display excellent performance in dynamic wireless environments

Evolution of NOMA Toward Next Generation Multiple Access (NGMA) for 6G

Due to the explosive growth in the number of wireless devices and diverse wireless services, such as virtual/augmented reality and Internet-of-Everything, next generation wireless networks face unprecedented challenges caused by heterogeneous data traffic, massive connectivity, and ultra-high bandwidth efficiency and ultra-low latency requirements. To address these challenges, advanced multiple access schemes are expected to be developed, namely next generation multiple access (NGMA), which are capable of supporting massive numbers of users in a more resource- and complexity-efficient manner than existing multiple access schemes. As the research on NGMA is in a very early stage, in this paper, we explore the evolution of NGMA with a particular focus on non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), i.e., the transition from NOMA to NGMA. In particular, we first review the fundamental capacity limits of NOMA, elaborate on the new requirements for NGMA, and discuss several possible candidate techniques. Moreover, given the high compatibility and flexibility of NOMA, we provide an overview of current research efforts on multi-antenna techniques for NOMA, promising future application scenarios of NOMA, and the interplay between NOMA and other emerging physical layer techniques. Furthermore, we discuss advanced mathematical tools for facilitating the design of NOMA communication systems, including conventional optimization approaches and new machine learning techniques. Next, we propose a unified framework for NGMA based on multiple antennas and NOMA, where both downlink and uplink transmissions are considered, thus setting the foundation for this emerging research area. Finally, several practical implementation challenges for NGMA are highlighted as motivation for future work.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, a survey paper accepted by the IEEE JSAC special issue on Next Generation Multiple Acces

Improving Macrocell - Small Cell Coexistence through Adaptive Interference Draining

The deployment of underlay small base stations (SBSs) is expected to significantly boost the spectrum efficiency and the coverage of next-generation cellular networks. However, the coexistence of SBSs underlaid to an existing macro-cellular network faces important challenges, notably in terms of spectrum sharing and interference management. In this paper, we propose a novel game-theoretic model that enables the SBSs to optimize their transmission rates by making decisions on the resource occupation jointly in the frequency and spatial domains. This procedure, known as interference draining, is performed among cooperative SBSs and allows to drastically reduce the interference experienced by both macro- and small cell users. At the macrocell side, we consider a modified water-filling policy for the power allocation that allows each macrocell user (MUE) to focus the transmissions on the degrees of freedom over which the MUE experiences the best channel and interference conditions. This approach not only represents an effective way to decrease the received interference at the MUEs but also grants the SBSs tier additional transmission opportunities and allows for a more agile interference management. Simulation results show that the proposed approach yields significant gains at both macrocell and small cell tiers, in terms of average achievable rate per user, reaching up to 37%, relative to the non-cooperative case, for a network with 150 MUEs and 200 SBSs

Optimisation de la gestion des interférences inter-cellulaires et de l'attachement des mobiles dans les réseaux cellulaires LTE

Driven by an exponential growth in mobile broadband-enabled devices and a continue dincrease in individual data consumption, mobile data traffic has grown 4000-fold over the past 10 years and almost 400-million-fold over the past 15 years. Homogeneouscellular networks have been facing limitations to handle soaring mobile data traffic and to meet the growing end-user demand for more bandwidth and betterquality of experience. These limitations are mainly related to the available spectrumand the capacity of the network. Telecommunication industry has to address these challenges and meet exploding demand. At the same time, it has to guarantee a healthy economic model to reduce the carbon footprint which is caused by mobile communications.Heterogeneous Networks (HetNets), composed of macro base stations and low powerbase stations of different types, are seen as the key solution to improve spectral efficiency per unit area and to eliminate coverage holes. In such networks, intelligent user association and interference management schemes are needed to achieve gains in performance. Due to the large imbalance in transmission power between macroand small cells, user association based on strongest signal received is not adapted inHetNets as only few users would attach to low power nodes. A technique based onCell Individual Offset (CIO) is therefore required to perform load balancing and to favor some Small Cell (SC) attraction against Macro Cell (MC). This offset is addedto users’ Reference Signal Received Power (RSRP) measurements and hence inducing handover towards different eNodeBs. As Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular networks use the same frequency sub-bands, mobile users may experience strong inter-cellxv interference, especially at cell edge. Therefore, there is a need to coordinate resource allocation among the cells and minimize inter-cell interference. To mitigate stronginter-cell interference, the resource, in time, frequency and power domain, should be allocated efficiently. A pattern for each dimension is computed to permit especially for cell edge users to benefit of higher throughput and quality of experience. The optimization of all these parameters can also offer gain in energy use. In this thesis,we propose a concrete versatile dynamic solution performing an optimization of user association and resource allocation in LTE cellular networks maximizing a certainnet work utility function that can be adequately chosen. Our solution, based on gametheory, permits to compute Cell Individual Offset and a pattern of power transmission over frequency and time domain for each cell. We present numerical simulations toillustrate the important performance gain brought by this optimization. We obtain significant benefits in the average throughput and also cell edge user through put of40% and 55% gains respectively. Furthermore, we also obtain a meaningful improvement in energy efficiency. This work addresses industrial research challenges and assuch, a prototype acting on emulated HetNets traffic has been implemented.Conduit par une croissance exponentielle dans les appareils mobiles et une augmentation continue de la consommation individuelle des données, le trafic de données mobiles a augmenté de 4000 fois au cours des 10 dernières années et près de 400millions fois au cours des 15 dernières années. Les réseaux cellulaires homogènes rencontrent de plus en plus de difficultés à gérer l’énorme trafic de données mobiles et à assurer un débit plus élevé et une meilleure qualité d’expérience pour les utilisateurs.Ces difficultés sont essentiellement liées au spectre disponible et à la capacité du réseau.L’industrie de télécommunication doit relever ces défis et en même temps doit garantir un modèle économique pour les opérateurs qui leur permettra de continuer à investir pour répondre à la demande croissante et réduire l’empreinte carbone due aux communications mobiles. Les réseaux cellulaires hétérogènes (HetNets), composés de stations de base macro et de différentes stations de base de faible puissance,sont considérés comme la solution clé pour améliorer l’efficacité spectrale par unité de surface et pour éliminer les trous de couverture. Dans de tels réseaux, il est primordial d’attacher intelligemment les utilisateurs aux stations de base et de bien gérer les interférences afin de gagner en performance. Comme la différence de puissance d’émission est importante entre les grandes et petites cellules, l’association habituelle des mobiles aux stations de bases en se basant sur le signal le plus fort, n’est plus adaptée dans les HetNets. Une technique basée sur des offsets individuelles par cellule Offset(CIO) est donc nécessaire afin d’équilibrer la charge entre les cellules et d’augmenter l’attraction des petites cellules (SC) par rapport aux cellules macro (MC). Cette offset est ajoutée à la valeur moyenne de la puissance reçue du signal de référence(RSRP) mesurée par le mobile et peut donc induire à un changement d’attachement vers différents eNodeB. Comme les stations de bases dans les réseaux cellulaires LTE utilisent les mêmes sous-bandes de fréquences, les mobiles peuvent connaître une forte interférence intercellulaire, en particulier en bordure de cellules. Par conséquent, il est primordial de coordonner l’allocation des ressources entre les cellules et de minimiser l’interférence entre les cellules. Pour atténuer la forte interférence intercellulaire, les ressources, en termes de temps, fréquence et puissance d’émission, devraient être alloués efficacement. Un modèle pour chaque dimension est calculé pour permettre en particulier aux utilisateurs en bordure de cellule de bénéficier d’un débit plus élevé et d’une meilleure qualité de l’expérience. L’optimisation de tous ces paramètres peut également offrir un gain en consommation d’énergie. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une solution dynamique polyvalente effectuant une optimisation de l’attachement des mobiles aux stations de base et de l’allocation des ressources dans les réseaux cellulaires LTE maximisant une fonction d’utilité du réseau qui peut être choisie de manière adéquate.Notre solution, basée sur la théorie des jeux, permet de calculer les meilleures valeurs pour l’offset individuelle par cellule (CIO) et pour les niveaux de puissance à appliquer au niveau temporel et fréquentiel pour chaque cellule. Nous présentons des résultats des simulations effectuées pour illustrer le gain de performance important apporté par cette optimisation. Nous obtenons une significative hausse dans le débit moyen et le débit des utilisateurs en bordure de cellule avec 40 % et 55 % de gains respectivement. En outre, on obtient un gain important en énergie. Ce travail aborde des défis pour l’industrie des télécoms et en tant que tel, un prototype de l’optimiseur a été implémenté en se basant sur un trafic HetNets émulé

Millimeter Wave Cellular Networks: A MAC Layer Perspective

The millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency band is seen as a key enabler of multi-gigabit wireless access in future cellular networks. In order to overcome the propagation challenges, mmWave systems use a large number of antenna elements both at the base station and at the user equipment, which lead to high directivity gains, fully-directional communications, and possible noise-limited operations. The fundamental differences between mmWave networks and traditional ones challenge the classical design constraints, objectives, and available degrees of freedom. This paper addresses the implications that highly directional communication has on the design of an efficient medium access control (MAC) layer. The paper discusses key MAC layer issues, such as synchronization, random access, handover, channelization, interference management, scheduling, and association. The paper provides an integrated view on MAC layer issues for cellular networks, identifies new challenges and tradeoffs, and provides novel insights and solution approaches.Comment: 21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

D11.2 Consolidated results on the performance limits of wireless communications

Deliverable D11.2 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the Intermediate Results of N# JRAs on Performance Limits of Wireless Communications and highlights the fundamental issues that have been investigated by the WP1.1. The report illustrates the Joint Research Activities (JRAs) already identified during the first year of the project which are currently ongoing. For each activity there is a description, an illustration of the adherence and relevance with the identified fundamental open issues, a short presentation of the preliminary results, and a roadmap for the joint research work in the next year. Appendices for each JRA give technical details on the scientific activity in each JRA.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Pré-codificação e equalização para sistemas SC-FDMA heterogéneos

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesMobile traffic in cellular networks is increasing exponentially. Small-cells are considered as a key solution to meet these requirements. Under the same spectrum the small-cells and the associated macro-cell (forming the so called heterogeneous systems) must cooperate so that one system can adapt to the other. If no cooperation is considered then the small-cells will generate harmful interference at the macro-cell. Interference alignment (IA) is a precoding technique that is able to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom of the interference channel, and can efficiently deal with inter-systems interference. Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) is a promising solution technique for high data rate uplink communications in future cellular systems. Conventional linear equalizers are not efficient to remove the residual inter-carrier interference of the SC-FDMA systems. For this reason, there has been significant interest in the design of nonlinear frequency domain equalizers in general and decision feedback equalizers in particular, with the iterative block decision feedback equalizer (IB-DFE) being the most promising nonlinear equalizer. In this dissertation we propose and evaluate joint interference alignment precoding at the small cell user terminals with iterative non-linear frequency domain equalizer at the receivers (macro base station and central unit) for SC-FDMA based heterogeneous networks. The small-cell precoders are designed by enforcing that all generated interference at the macro-cell is aligned in an orthogonal subspace to the macro-cell received signal subspace. This enforces that no performance degradation is observed at the macro cell. Then, we design an iterative nonlinear frequency domain equalizer at the macro-cell receiver that is able to recover the macro-cell spatial streams, in the presence of both small-cell and inter-carrier interferences. The results show that the proposed transmitter and receiver structures are robust to the inter-system interferences and at the same time are able to efficient separate the macro and small cells spatial streams.O trafego móvel nas redes celulares tem aumentado exponencialmente. As pico- células são consideradas como a solução chave para cumprir estes requisitos. Dentro do mesmo espectro, as pico-células e as macro-células (formando os chamados sistemas heterogéneos) precisam de colaborar de modo a que um sistema possa adaptar-se ao outro. Se não for considerada a cooperação, então as pico-células irão gerar interferência prejudicial na macro-célula. Interference alignment (IA) é uma técnica de précodificação que é capaz de atingir o grau máximo de liberdade do canal de interferência, e consegue lidar eficazmente com interferência entre sistemas. Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) é uma solução técnica promissora para transmissão de dados em uplink, para sistemas celulares futuros. Equalizadores lineares convencionais não são eficientes a remover a interferência residual entre portadoras dos sistemas SC-FDMA. Por este motivo, tem havido interesse significativo no desenho de equalizadores não lineares no domínio da frequência em geral e em equalizadores baseados em decisão por feedback em particular, tendo o iterative block decision feedback equalizer (IB-DFE) como o equalizador não linear mais promissor. Nesta dissertação propomos e avaliamos précodificação de alinhamento de interferência nos terminais das pico-células em conjunto com equalizadores não lineares no domínio da frequência nos recetores (estação base da macro-célula e unidade central de processamento) para redes heterogéneas baseadas em SC-FDMA. Os précodificadores das pico-células são desenhados de maneira a obrigar a que toda a interferência gerada na macro-célula esteja alinhada num subespaço ortogonal em relação ao subespaço do sinal recebido na macro- célula. Isto obriga a que não seja observada degradação de desempenho na macro-célula. Em seguida, desenhamos um equalizador não linear no domínio da frequência no recetor da macro-célula capaz de recuperar os fluxos de dados da macro-célula, na presença de interferência tanto entre portadoras como das pico-células. Os resultados mostram que as estruturas de transmissão e receção propostas são robustas contra a interferência entre sistemas e ao mesmo tempo capaz de separar eficientemente os dados da macro e das pico células

Delay QoS Provisioning and Optimal Resource Allocation for Wireless Networks

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth in wireless communication and networking due to the exponential growth in mobile applications and smart devices, fueling unprecedented increase in both mobile data traffic and energy demand. Among such data traffic, real-time data transmissions in wireless systems require certain quality of service (QoS) constraints e.g., in terms of delay, buffer overflow or packet drop/loss probabilities, so that acceptable performance levels can be guaranteed for the end-users, especially in delay sensitive scenarios, such as live video transmission, interactive video (e.g., teleconferencing), and mobile online gaming. With this motivation, statistical queuing constraints are considered in this thesis, imposed as limitations on the decay rate of buffer overflow probabilities. In particular, the throughput and energy efficiency of different types of wireless network models are analyzed under QoS constraints, and optimal resource allocation algorithms are proposed to maximize the throughput or minimize the delay. In the first part of the thesis, the throughput and energy efficiency analysis for hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols are conducted under QoS constraints. Approximations are employed for small QoS exponent values in order to obtain closed-form expressions for the throughput and energy efficiency metrics. Also, the impact of random arrivals, deadline constraints, outage probability and QoS constraints are studied. For the same system setting, the throughput of HARQ system is also analyzed using a recurrence approach, which provides more accurate results for any value of the QoS exponent. Similarly, random arrival models and deadline constraints are considered, and these results are further extended to the finite-blocklength coding regime. Next, cooperative relay networks are considered under QoS constraints. Specifically, the throughput performance in the two-hop relay channel, two-way relay channel, and multi-source multi-destination relay networks is analyzed. Finite-blocklength codes are considered for the two-hop relay channel, and optimization over the error probabilities is investigated. For the multi-source multi-destination relay network model, the throughput for both cases of with and without CSI at the transmitter sides is studied. When there is perfect CSI at the transmitter, transmission rates can be varied according to instantaneous channel conditions. When CSI is not available at the transmitter side, transmissions are performed at fixed rates, and decoding failures lead to retransmission requests via an ARQ protocol. Following the analysis of cooperative networks, the performance of both half-duplex and full-duplex operations is studied for the two-way multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system under QoS constraints. In full-duplex mode, the self-interference inflicted on the reception of a user due to simultaneous transmissions from the same user is taken into account. In this setting, the system throughput is formulated by considering the sum of the effective capacities of the users in both half-duplex and full-duplex modes. The low signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime is considered and the optimal transmission/power-allocation strategies are characterized by identifying the optimal input covariance matrices. Next, mode selection and resource allocation for device-to-device (D2D) cellular networks are studied. As the starting point, ransmission mode selection and resource allocation are analyzed for a time-division multiplexed (TDM) cellular network with one cellular user, one base station, and a pair of D2D users under rate and QoS constraints. For a more complicated setting with multiple cellular and D2D users, two joint mode selection and resource allocation algorithms are proposed. In the first algorithm, the channel allocation problem is formulated as a maximum-weight matching problem, which can be solved by employing the Hungarian algorithm. In the second algorithm, the problem is divided into three subproblems, namely user partition, power allocation and channel assignment, and a novel three-step method is proposed by combining the algorithms designed for the three subproblems. In the final part of the thesis, resource allocation algorithms are investigated for content delivery over wireless networks. Three different systems are considered. Initially, a caching algorithm is designed, which minimizes the average delay of a single-cell network. The proposed algorithm is applicable in settings with very general popularity models, with no assumptions on how file popularity varies among different users, and this algorithm is further extended to a more general setting, in which the system parameters and the distributions of channel fading change over time. Next, for D2D cellular networks operating under deadline constraints, a scheduling algorithm is designed, which manages mode selection, channel allocation and power maximization with acceptable complexity. This proposed scheduling algorithm is designed based on the convex delay cost method for a D2D cellular network with deadline constraints in an OFDMA setting. Power optimization algorithms are proposed for all possible modes, based on our utility definition. Finally, a two-step intercell interference (ICI)-aware scheduling algorithm is proposed for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), which performs user grouping and resource allocation with the goal of minimizing delay violation probability. A novel user grouping algorithm is developed for the user grouping step, which controls the interference among the users in the same group, and the channel assignment problem is formulated as a maximum-weight matching problem in the second step, which can be solved using standard algorithms in graph theory