Wireless Communications

What will 5G be? What it will not be is an incremental advance on 4G. The previous four generations of cellular technology have each been a major paradigm shift that has broken backward compatibility. Indeed, 5G will need to be a paradigm shift that includes very high carrier frequencies with massive bandwidths, extreme base station and device densities, and unprecedented numbers of antennas. However, unlike the previous four generations, it will also be highly integrative: tying any new 5G air interface and spectrum together with LTE and WiFi to provide universal high-rate coverage and a seamless user experience. To support this, the core network will also have to reach unprecedented levels of flexibility and intelligence, spectrum regulation will need to be rethought and improved, and energy and cost efficiencies will become even more critical considerations. This paper discusses all of these topics, identifying key challenges for future research and preliminary 5G standardization activities, while providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature, and in particular of the papers appearing in this special issue.

What Will 5G Be

This paper provides an overview of the Internet of Things (IoT) with emphasis on enabling technologies, protocols, and application issues. The IoT is enabled by the latest developments in RFID, smart sensors, communication technologies, and Internet protocols. The basic premise is to have smart sensors collaborate directly without human involvement to deliver a new class of applications. The current revolution in Internet, mobile, and machine-to-machine (M2M) technologies can be seen as the first phase of the IoT. In the coming years, the IoT is expected to bridge diverse technologies to enable new applications by connecting physical objects together in support of intelligent decision making. This paper starts by providing a horizontal overview of the IoT. Then, we give an overview of some technical details that pertain to the IoT enabling technologies, protocols, and applications. Compared to other survey papers in the field, our objective is to provide a more thorough summary of the most relevant protocols and application issues to enable researchers and application developers to get up to speed quickly on how the different protocols fit together to deliver desired functionalities without having to go through RFCs and the standards specifications. We also provide an overview of some of the key IoT challenges presented in the recent literature and provide a summary of related research work. Moreover, we explore the relation between the IoT and other emerging technologies including big data analytics and cloud and fog computing. We also present the need for better horizontal integration among IoT services. Finally, we present detailed service use-cases to illustrate how the different protocols presented in the paper fit together to deliver desired IoT services.

Internet of Things: A Survey on Enabling Technologies, Protocols, and Applications

Millimeter wave (mmWave) signals experience orders-of-magnitude more pathloss than the microwave signals currently used in most wireless applications and all cellular systems. MmWave systems must therefore leverage large antenna arrays, made possible by the decrease in wavelength, to combat pathloss with beamforming gain. Beamforming with multiple data streams, known as precoding, can be used to further improve mmWave spectral efficiency. Both beamforming and precoding are done digitally at baseband in traditional multi-antenna systems. The high cost and power consumption of mixed-signal devices in mmWave systems, however, make analog processing in the RF domain more attractive. This hardware limitation restricts the feasible set of precoders and combiners that can be applied by practical mmWave transceivers. In this paper, we consider transmit precoding and receiver combining in mmWave systems with large antenna arrays. We exploit the spatial structure of mmWave channels to formulate the precoding/combining problem as a sparse reconstruction problem. Using the principle of basis pursuit, we develop algorithms that accurately approximate optimal unconstrained precoders and combiners such that they can be implemented in low-cost RF hardware. We present numerical results on the performance of the proposed algorithms and show that they allow mmWave systems to approach their unconstrained performance limits, even when transceiver hardware constraints are considered.

Spatially Sparse Precoding in Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems

The vision of next generation 5G wireless communications lies in providing very high data rates (typically of Gbps order), extremely low latency, manifold increase in base station capacity, and significant improvement in users’ perceived quality of service (QoS), compared to current 4G LTE networks. Ever increasing proliferation of smart devices, introduction of new emerging multimedia applications, together with an exponential rise in wireless data (multimedia) demand and usage is already creating a significant burden on existing cellular networks. 5G wireless systems, with improved data rates, capacity, latency, and QoS are expected to be the panacea of most of the current cellular networks’ problems. In this survey, we make an exhaustive review of wireless evolution toward 5G networks. We first discuss the new architectural changes associated with the radio access network (RAN) design, including air interfaces, smart antennas, cloud and heterogeneous RAN. Subsequently, we make an in-depth survey of underlying novel mm-wave physical layer technologies, encompassing new channel model estimation, directional antenna design, beamforming algorithms, and massive MIMO technologies. Next, the details of MAC layer protocols and multiplexing schemes needed to efficiently support this new physical layer are discussed. We also look into the killer applications, considered as the major driving force behind 5G. In order to understand the improved user experience, we provide highlights of new QoS, QoE, and SON features associated with the 5G evolution. For alleviating the increased network energy consumption and operating expenditure, we make a detail review on energy awareness and cost efficiency. As understanding the current status of 5G implementation is important for its eventual commercialization, we also discuss relevant field trials, drive tests, and simulation experiments. Finally, we point out major existing research issues and identify possible future research directions.

Next Generation 5G Wireless Networks: A Comprehensive Survey

A method in a communication system (100) includes transmitting from a source user (101) a first data packet (111) over a first time frame (121) having a finite time period (131), transmitting from source user (101) a second data packet (112) over a second time frame (122) immediately subsequent to first time frame (121), detecting an acknowledgment of acceptable reception of data packet associated with either first or said second data packets (111 and 112), repeating transmission of first and second data packets (111 and 112) in a sequence of first and second time frames (121 and 122) in a time frame sequence (190) until the detection.

Multi channel stop and wait arq communication method and apparatus

A subscriber unit (104) with multiple receive antennas (160, 162) and a single transmit antenna (160) derives beamforming weights to be used at a base station (102) with multiple transmitting antennas (602, 604, 606, and 608). The downlink beamforming weights are derived at the subscriber unit (104) from a prior downlink transmission from the base station (102) to the subscriber device (104) and an uplink sounding signal is used to carry derived downlink beam forming weights to the base station (102). Downlink antenna specific pilots (without weight) are used at the subscriber device (104) to determine the beamforming weights. Decimated sounding signals, where the number of sounding subcarriers is al least the same as the number of antennas at the base station (102), allow multiple users to sound at the same time.

Mobile assisted downlink beamforming with antenna weight feedback

2016 IEEE 83rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring 2016))

A transmitter transmits the desired signal using a continuous duty cycle at transmission rates of less than full rate (Fig. 6). The energy used in each power control group is related to the transmission rate. By repeating the power control groups, time division diversity (Fig. 6) is provided. In the receiver, the received power control groups are analyzed and compared to several levels of energy thresholds (73, 75, 77, 79). The results of the comparisons are converted into a power control signal (74, 76, 78, 80, 81) and returned to the mobile. The mobiles are capable of selecting the appropriate bit (93) and adjusting their power (94). Alternatively, an indicator of the transmission rate can be forwarded (155) in advance of the frame. The receiver compares a power estimate with the threshold for the transmission rate indicated (166).

Power control for CDMA communication systems

To address the need for a resource allocation scheme that results in a better tradeoff between cell-edge performance and overall spectral efficiency, a communication system (100) is provided that allocates uplink transmit power to user equipment (UEs) (102, 104) based on a fractional power control scheme (300). In another embodiment, since the cell-edge users are also likely to be power limited, the communication system may implement a minimized uplink transmission bandwidth resource allocation scheme (404, 406, 408, 410, 412, 414) that may work with the fractional power control scheme to achieve a level of performance desired for uplink transmissions in 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) and 3GPP2 Evolution communication systems.

Amitava Ghosh

Papers

Multi channel stop and wait arq communication method and apparatus

Mobile assisted downlink beamforming with antenna weight feedback

2016 IEEE 83rd Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC Spring 2016))

Power control for CDMA communication systems

Method and apparatus for uplink resource allocation in a frequency division multiple access communication system