Natural Regulation of Energy Flow in a Green Quantum Photocell

Manipulating the flow of energy in nanoscale and molecular photonic devices is of both fundamental interest and central importance for applications in light harvesting optoelectronics. Under erratic solar irradiance conditions, unregulated power fluctuations in a light harvesting photocell lead to inefficient energy storage in conventional solar cells and potentially fatal oxidative damage in photosynthesis. Here, we show that regulation against these fluctuations arises naturally within a two-channel quantum heat engine photocell, thus enabling the efficient conversion of varying incident solar spectrum at Earth's surface. Remarkably, absorption in the green portion of the spectrum is avoided, as it provides no inherent regulatory benefit. Our findings illuminate a quantum structural origin of regulation, provide a novel optoelectronic design strategy, and may elucidate the link between photoprotection in photosynthesis and the predominance of green plants on Earth.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

On the Spectral Efficiency and Fairness in Full-Duplex Cellular Networks

To increase the spectral efficiency of wireless networks without requiring full-duplex capability of user devices, a potential solution is the recently proposed three-node full-duplex mode. To realize this potential, networks employing three-node full-duplex transmissions must deal with self-interference and user-to-user interference, which can be managed by frequency channel and power allocation techniques. Whereas previous works investigated either spectral efficient or fair mechanisms, a scheme that balances these two metrics among users is investigated in this paper. This balancing scheme is based on a new solution method of the multi-objective optimization problem to maximize the weighted sum of the per-user spectral efficiency and the minimum spectral efficiency among users. The mixed integer non-linear nature of this problem is dealt by Lagrangian duality. Based on the proposed solution approach, a low-complexity centralized algorithm is developed, which relies on large scale fading measurements that can be advantageously implemented at the base station. Numerical results indicate that the proposed algorithm increases the spectral efficiency and fairness among users without the need of weighting the spectral efficiency. An important conclusion is that managing user-to-user interference by resource assignment and power control is crucial for ensuring spectral efficient and fair operation of full-duplex networks.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted in IEEE ICC 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1603.0067

Performance Analysis of Network-Assisted Two-Hop D2D Communications

Network-assisted single-hop device-to-device (D2D) communication can increase the spectral and energy efficiency of cellular networks by taking advantage of the proximity, reuse, and hop gains when radio resources are properly managed between the cellular and D2D layers. In this paper we argue that D2D technology can be used to further increase the spectral and energy efficiency if the key D2D radio resource management algorithms are suitably extended to support network assisted multi-hop D2D communications. Specifically, we propose a novel, distributed utility maximizing D2D power control (PC) scheme that is able to balance spectral and energy efficiency while taking into account mode selection and resource allocation constraints that are important in the integrated cellular-D2D environment. Our analysis and numerical results indicate that multi-hop D2D communications combined with the proposed PC scheme can be useful not only for harvesting the potential gains previously identified in the literature, but also for extending the coverage of cellular networks.Comment: 6 pages and 7 figure

Distributed Spectral Efficiency Maximization in Full-Duplex Cellular Networks

Three-node full-duplex is a promising new transmission mode between a full-duplex capable wireless node and two other wireless nodes that use half-duplex transmission and reception respectively. Although three-node full-duplex transmissions can increase the spectral efficiency without requiring full-duplex capability of user devices, inter-node interference - in addition to the inherent self-interference - can severely degrade the performance. Therefore, as methods that provide effective self-interference mitigation evolve, the management of inter-node interference is becoming increasingly important. This paper considers a cellular system in which a full-duplex capable base station serves a set of half-duplex capable users. As the spectral efficiencies achieved by the uplink and downlink transmissions are inherently intertwined, the objective is to device channel assignment and power control algorithms that maximize the weighted sum of the uplink-downlink transmissions. To this end a distributed auction based channel assignment algorithm is proposed, in which the scheduled uplink users and the base station jointly determine the set of downlink users for full-duplex transmission. Realistic system simulations indicate that the spectral efficiency can be up to 89% better than using the traditional half-duplex mode. Furthermore, when the self-interference cancelling level is high, the impact of the user-to-user interference is severe unless properly managed.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, accepted in IEEE ICC 2016 - Workshop on Novel Medium Access and Resource Allocation for 5G Network