High Speed Railway Wireless Communications: Efficiency v.s. Fairness

High speed railways (HSRs) have been deployed widely all over the world in recent years. Different from traditional cellular communication, its high mobility makes it essential to implement power allocation along the time. In the HSR case, the transmission rate depends greatly on the distance between the base station (BS) and the train. As a result, the train receives a time varying data rate service when passing by a BS. It is clear that the most efficient power allocation will spend all the power when the train is nearest from the BS, which will cause great unfairness along the time. On the other hand, the channel inversion allocation achieves the best fairness in terms of constant rate transmission. However, its power efficiency is much lower. Therefore, the power efficiency and the fairness along time are two incompatible objects. For the HSR cellular system considered in this paper, a trade-off between the two is achieved by proposing a temporal proportional fair power allocation scheme. Besides, near optimal closed form solution and one algorithm finding the $\epsilon$-optimal allocation are presented.Comment: 16 pages, 6 figure

Outage Probability of Energy Harvesting Relay-aided Cooperative Networks Over Rayleigh Fading Channel

Energy harvesting technique is a potential way for relay node energy supply in cooperative networks in terms of deployment flexibility and maintain charge reduction. Unlike traditional power source, relay node in this case may run out of energy with certain probability, which can degrade the benefit from relay-aided cooperative transmission. In this paper, we concentrate on the outage behavior of cooperative networks aided by energy harvesting relay node in slow fading channel, and attempt to derive the closed-form expression of outage probability of proposed cooperative protocol. Compared with traditional direct transmission protocol, two conclusions are derived: 1) the diversity gain cannot be increased excepting the extreme case that energy-exhausted probability is zero; 2) a multiplicative gain for improving system performance can be obtained in terms of minimizing outage probability.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Energy Efficiency with Proportional Rate Fairness in Multi-Relay OFDM Networks

This paper investigates the energy efficiency (EE) in multiple relay aided OFDM system, where decode-and-forward (DF) relay beamforming is employed to help the information transmission. In order to explore the EE performance with user fairness for such a system, we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the EE by jointly considering several factors, the transmission mode selection (DF relay beamforming or direct-link transmission), the helping relay set selection, the subcarrier assignment and the power allocation at the source and relays on subcarriers, under nonlinear proportional rate fairness constraints, where both transmit power consumption and linearly rate-dependent circuit power consumption are taken into account. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, we propose a low-complexity scheme to approximate it. Simulation results demonstrate its effectiveness. We also investigate the effects of the circuit power consumption on system performances and observe that with both the constant and the linearly rate-dependent circuit power consumption, system EE grows with the increment of system average channel-to noise ratio (CNR), but the growth rates show different behaviors. For the constant circuit power consumption, system EE increasing rate is an increasing function of the system average CNR, while for the linearly rate-dependent one, system EE increasing rate is a decreasing function of the system average CNR. This observation is very important which indicates that by deducing the circuit dynamic power consumption per unit data rate, system EE can be greatly enhanced. Besides, we also discuss the effects of the number of users and subcarriers on the system EE performance.Comment: 35 pages, 15 fihures, submitted to IEEE Journa

The Deterministic Time-Linearity of Service Provided by Fading Channels

In the paper, we study the service process $S(t)$ of an independent and identically distributed (\textit{i.i.d.}) Nakagami-$m$ fading channel, which is defined as the amount of service provided, i.e., the integral of the instantaneous channel capacity over time $t$. By using the Characteristic Function (CF) approach and the infinitely divisible law, it is proved that, other than certain generally recognized curve form {or a stochastic process}, the channel service process $S(t)$ is a deterministic linear function of time $t$, namely, $S(t)=c_m^\ast\cdot t$ where $c_m^\ast$ is a constant determined by the fading parameter $m$. Furthermore, we extend it to general \textit{i.i.d.} fading channels and present an explicit form of the constant service rate $c_p^\ast$. The obtained work provides such a new insight on the system design of joint source/channel coding that there exists a coding scheme such that a receiver can decode with zero error probability and zero high layer queuing delay, if the transmitter maintains a constant data rate no more than $c_p^\ast$. Finally, we verify our analysis through Monte Carlo simulations.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figure

Efficient Signal-Time Coding Design and its Application in Wireless Gaussian Relay Networks

Signal-time coding, which combines the traditional encoding/modulation mode in the signal domain with signal pulse phase modulation in the time domain, was proposed to improve the information flow rate in relay networks. In this paper, we mainly focus on the efficient signal-time coding design. We first derive an explicit iterative algorithm to estimate the maximum number of available codes given the code length of signal-time coding, and then present an iterative construction method of codebooks. It is shown that compared with conventional computer search, the proposed iterative construction method can reduce the complexity greatly. Numerical results will also indicate that the new constructed codebook is optimal in terms of coding rate. To minimize the buffer size needed to store the codebook while keeping a relatively high efficiency, we shall propose a combinatorial construction method. We will then consider applications in wireless Gaussian relay networks. It will be shown that in the three node network model, the mixed transmission by using two-hop and direct transmissions is not always a good option

LRC: Dependency-Aware Cache Management for Data Analytics Clusters

Memory caches are being aggressively used in today's data-parallel systems such as Spark, Tez, and Piccolo. However, prevalent systems employ rather simple cache management policies--notably the Least Recently Used (LRU) policy--that are oblivious to the application semantics of data dependency, expressed as a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Without this knowledge, memory caching can at best be performed by "guessing" the future data access patterns based on historical information (e.g., the access recency and/or frequency), which frequently results in inefficient, erroneous caching with low hit ratio and a long response time. In this paper, we propose a novel cache replacement policy, Least Reference Count (LRC), which exploits the application-specific DAG information to optimize the cache management. LRC evicts the cached data blocks whose reference count is the smallest. The reference count is defined, for each data block, as the number of dependent child blocks that have not been computed yet. We demonstrate the efficacy of LRC through both empirical analysis and cluster deployments against popular benchmarking workloads. Our Spark implementation shows that, compared with LRU, LRC speeds up typical applications by 60%.Comment: 9 page

Wireless Information and Energy Transfer for Two-Hop Non-Regenerative MIMO-OFDM Relay Networks

This paper investigates the simultaneous wireless information and energy transfer for the non-regenerative multipleinput multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) relaying system. By considering two practical receiver architectures, we present two protocols, time switchingbased relaying (TSR) and power splitting-based relaying (PSR). To explore the system performance limit, we formulate two optimization problems to maximize the end-to-end achievable information rate with the full channel state information (CSI) assumption. Since both problems are non-convex and have no known solution method, we firstly derive some explicit results by theoretical analysis and then design effective algorithms for them. Numerical results show that the performances of both protocols are greatly affected by the relay position. Specifically, PSR and TSR show very different behaviors to the variation of relay position. The achievable information rate of PSR monotonically decreases when the relay moves from the source towards the destination, but for TSR, the performance is relatively worse when the relay is placed in the middle of the source and the destination. This is the first time to observe such a phenomenon. In addition, it is also shown that PSR always outperforms TSR in such a MIMO-OFDM relaying system. Moreover, the effect of the number of antennas and the number of subcarriers are also discussed.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figures, to appear in IEEE Selected Areas in Communication

Optimum Transmission Policies for Energy Harvesting Sensor Networks Powered By a Mobile Control Center

Wireless energy transfer, namely RF-based energy harvesting, is a potential way to prolong the lifetime of energy-constrained devices, especially in wireless sensor networks. However, due to huge propagation attenuation, its energy efficiency is regarded as the biggest bottleneck to widely applications. It is critical to find appropriate transmission policies to improve the global energy efficiency in this kind of systems. To this end, this paper focuses on the sensor networks scenario, where a mobile control center powers the sensors by RF signal and also collects information from them. Two related schemes, called as harvest-and-use scheme and harvest-store-use scheme, are investigated, respectively. In harvest-and-use scheme, as a benchmark, both constant and adaptive transmission modes from sensors are discussed. To harvest-store-use scheme, we propose a new concept, the best opportunity for wireless energy transfer, and use it to derive an explicit closed-form expression of optimal transmission policy. It is shown by simulation that a considerable improvement in terms of energy efficiency can be obtained with the help of the transmission policies developed in this paper. Furthermore, the transmission policies is also discussed under the constraint of fixed information rate. The minimal required power, the performance loss from the new constraint as well as the effect of fading are then presented.Comment: 30 pages, 5 figures. The short version was presented in part at 2015 IEEE International Conference on Communicatio

Weighted Sum-Throughput Maximization for MIMO Broadcast Channel: Energy Harvesting Under System Imperfection

In this work, a MIMO broadcast channel under the energy harvesting (EH) constraint and the peak power constraint is investigated. The transmitter is equipped with a hybrid energy storage system consisting of a perfect super capacitor (SC) and an inefficient battery, where both elements have limited energy storage capacities. In addition, the effect of data processing circuit power consumption is also addressed. To be specific, two extreme cases are studied here, where the first assumes ideal/zero circuit power consumption and the second considers a positive constant circuit power consumption where the circuit is always operating at its highest power level. The performance of these two extreme cases hence serve as the upper bound and the lower bound of the system performance in practice, respectively. In this setting, the offline scheduling with ideal and maximum circuit power consumptions are investigated. The associated optimization problems are formulated and solved in terms of weighted throughput optimization. Further, we extend to a general circuit power consumption model. To complement this work, some intuitive online policies are presented for all cases. Interestingly, for the case with maximum circuit power consumption, a close-to-optimal online policy is presented and its performance is shown to be comparable to its offline counterpart in the numerical results.Comment: 30 page

Directivity-Beamwidth Tradeoff of Massive MIMO Uplink Beamforming for High Speed Train Communication

High-mobility adaption and massive Multiple-input Multiple-output (MIMO) application are two primary evolving objectives for the next generation high speed train (HST) wireless communication system. In this paper, we consider how to design a location-aware beamforming for the massive MIMO system in the high traffic density HST network. We first analyze the tradeoff between beam directivity and beamwidth, based on which we present the sensitivity analysis of positioning accuracy. Then, in order to guarantee a high efficient transmission, we derive an optimal problem to maximize the beam directivity under the restriction of diverse positioning accuracies. After that, we present a low-complexity beamforming design by utilizing location information, which requires neither eigen-decomposing (ED) the uplink channel covariance matrix (CCM) nor ED the downlink CCM (DCCM). Finally, we study the beamforming scheme in future high traffic density HST network, where a two HSTs encountering scenario is emphasized. By utilizing the real-time location information, we propose an optimal adaptive beamforming scheme to maximize the achievable rate region under limited channel source constraint. Numerical simulation indicates that a massive MIMO system with less than a certain positioning error can guarantee a required performance with satisfying transmission efficiency in the high traffic density HST scenario and the achievable rate region when two HSTs encounter is greatly improved as well.Comment: This paper has been accepted for future publication in IEEE ACCESS. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1702.0212