Random Linear Network Coding for 5G Mobile Video Delivery

An exponential increase in mobile video delivery will continue with the demand for higher resolution, multi-view and large-scale multicast video services. Novel fifth generation (5G) 3GPP New Radio (NR) standard will bring a number of new opportunities for optimizing video delivery across both 5G core and radio access networks. One of the promising approaches for video quality adaptation, throughput enhancement and erasure protection is the use of packet-level random linear network coding (RLNC). In this review paper, we discuss the integration of RLNC into the 5G NR standard, building upon the ideas and opportunities identified in 4G LTE. We explicitly identify and discuss in detail novel 5G NR features that provide support for RLNC-based video delivery in 5G, thus pointing out to the promising avenues for future research.Comment: Invited paper for Special Issue "Network and Rateless Coding for Video Streaming" - MDPI Informatio

5GNOW: Challenging the LTE Design Paradigms of Orthogonality and Synchronicity

LTE and LTE-Advanced have been optimized to deliver high bandwidth pipes to wireless users. The transport mechanisms have been tailored to maximize single cell performance by enforcing strict synchronism and orthogonality within a single cell and within a single contiguous frequency band. Various emerging trends reveal major shortcomings of those design criteria: 1) The fraction of machine-type-communications (MTC) is growing fast. Transmissions of this kind are suffering from the bulky procedures necessary to ensure strict synchronism. 2) Collaborative schemes have been introduced to boost capacity and coverage (CoMP), and wireless networks are becoming more and more heterogeneous following the non-uniform distribution of users. Tremendous efforts must be spent to collect the gains and to manage such systems under the premise of strict synchronism and orthogonality. 3) The advent of the Digital Agenda and the introduction of carrier aggregation are forcing the transmission systems to deal with fragmented spectrum. 5GNOW is an European research project supported by the European Commission within FP7 ICT Call 8. It will question the design targets of LTE and LTE-Advanced having these shortcomings in mind and the obedience to strict synchronism and orthogonality will be challenged. It will develop new PHY and MAC layer concepts being better suited to meet the upcoming needs with respect to service variety and heterogeneous transmission setups. Wireless transmission networks following the outcomes of 5GNOW will be better suited to meet the manifoldness of services, device classes and transmission setups present in envisioned future scenarios like smart cities. The integration of systems relying heavily on MTC into the communication network will be eased. The per-user experience will be more uniform and satisfying. To ensure this 5GNOW will contribute to upcoming 5G standardization.Comment: Submitted to Workshop on Mobile and Wireless Communication Systems for 2020 and beyond (at IEEE VTC 2013, Spring

Performance Comparison of Dual Connectivity and Hard Handover for LTE-5G Tight Integration in mmWave Cellular Networks

MmWave communications are expected to play a major role in the Fifth generation of mobile networks. They offer a potential multi-gigabit throughput and an ultra-low radio latency, but at the same time suffer from high isotropic pathloss, and a coverage area much smaller than the one of LTE macrocells. In order to address these issues, highly directional beamforming and a very high-density deployment of mmWave base stations were proposed. This Thesis aims to improve the reliability and performance of the 5G network by studying its tight and seamless integration with the current LTE cellular network. In particular, the LTE base stations can provide a coverage layer for 5G mobile terminals, because they operate on microWave frequencies, which are less sensitive to blockage and have a lower pathloss. This document is a copy of the Master's Thesis carried out by Mr. Michele Polese under the supervision of Dr. Marco Mezzavilla and Prof. Michele Zorzi. It will propose an LTE-5G tight integration architecture, based on mobile terminals' dual connectivity to LTE and 5G radio access networks, and will evaluate which are the new network procedures that will be needed to support it. Moreover, this new architecture will be implemented in the ns-3 simulator, and a thorough simulation campaign will be conducted in order to evaluate its performance, with respect to the baseline of handover between LTE and 5G.Comment: Master's Thesis carried out by Mr. Michele Polese under the supervision of Dr. Marco Mezzavilla and Prof. Michele Zorz

Enabling RAN Slicing Through Carrier Aggregation in mmWave Cellular Networks

The ever increasing number of connected devices and of new and heterogeneous mobile use cases implies that 5G cellular systems will face demanding technical challenges. For example, Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) and enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) scenarios present orthogonal Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that 5G aims to satisfy with a unified Radio Access Network (RAN) design. Network slicing and mmWave communications have been identified as possible enablers for 5G. They provide, respectively, the necessary scalability and flexibility to adapt the network to each specific use case environment, and low latency and multi-gigabit-per-second wireless links, which tap into a vast, currently unused portion of the spectrum. The optimization and integration of these technologies is still an open research challenge, which requires innovations at different layers of the protocol stack. This paper proposes to combine them in a RAN slicing framework for mmWaves, based on carrier aggregation. Notably, we introduce MilliSlice, a cross-carrier scheduling policy that exploits the diversity of the carriers and maximizes their utilization, thus simultaneously guaranteeing high throughput for the eMBB slices and low latency and high reliability for the URLLC flows.Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures. Proc. of the 18th Mediterranean Communication and Computer Networking Conference (MedComNet 2020), Arona, Italy, 202

IEEE 802.11n MAC frame aggregation mechanisms for next-generation high-throughput WLANs [Medium access control protocols for wireless LANs]

IEEE 802.11n is an ongoing next-generation wireless LAN standard that supports a very highspeed connection with more than 100 Mb/s data throughput measured at the medium access control layer. This article investigates the key MAC enhancements that help 802.11n achieve high throughput and high efficiency. A detailed description is given for various frame aggregation mechanisms proposed in the latest 802.11n draft standard. Our simulation results confirm that A-MSDU, A-MPDU, and a combination of these methods improve extensively the channel efficiency and data throughput. We analyze the performance of each frame aggregation scheme in distinct scenarios, and we conclude that overall, the two-level aggregation is the most efficacious

Network emulation focusing on QoS-Oriented satellite communication

This chapter proposes network emulation basics and a complete case study of QoS-oriented Satellite Communication