Millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz are a new frontier for cellular communication that offers the promise of orders of magnitude greater bandwidths combined with further gains via beamforming and spatial multiplexing from multielement antenna arrays. This paper surveys measurements and capacity studies to assess this technology with a focus on small cell deployments in urban environments. The conclusions are extremely encouraging; measurements in New York City at 28 and 73 GHz demonstrate that, even in an urban canyon environment, significant non-line-of-sight (NLOS) outdoor, street-level coverage is possible up to approximately 200 m from a potential low-power microcell or picocell base station. In addition, based on statistical channel models from these measurements, it is shown that mmW systems can offer more than an order of magnitude increase in capacity over current state-of-the-art 4G cellular networks at current cell densities. Cellular systems, however, will need to be significantly redesigned to fully achieve these gains. Specifically, the requirement of highly directional and adaptive transmissions, directional isolation between links, and significant possibilities of outage have strong implications on multiple access, channel structure, synchronization, and receiver design. To address these challenges, the paper discusses how various technologies including adaptive beamforming, multihop relaying, heterogeneous network architectures, and carrier aggregation can be leveraged in the mmW context.

Millimeter-Wave Cellular Wireless Networks: Potentials and Challenges

Cloud Radio Access Network (C-RAN) is a novel mobile network architecture which can address a number of challenges the operators face while trying to support growing end-user's needs. The main idea behind C-RAN is to pool the Baseband Units (BBUs) from multiple base stations into centralized BBU Pool for statistical multiplexing gain, while shifting the burden to the high-speed wireline transmission of In-phase and Quadrature (IQ) data. C-RAN enables energy efficient network operation and possible cost savings on baseband resources. Furthermore, it improves network capacity by performing load balancing and cooperative processing of signals originating from several base stations. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art literature on C-RAN. It can serve as a starting point for anyone willing to understand C-RAN architecture and advance the research on C-RAN.

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Cloud RAN for Mobile Networks—A Technology Overview

Recently, there has been considerable interest in new tiered network cellular architectures, which would likely use many more cell sites than found today. Two major challenges will be i) providing backhaul to all of these cells and ii) finding efficient techniques to leverage higher frequency bands for mobile access and backhaul. This paper proposes the use of outdoor millimeter wave communications for backhaul networking between cells and mobile access within a cell. To overcome the outdoor impairments found in millimeter wave propagation, this paper studies beamforming using large arrays. However, such systems will require narrow beams, increasing sensitivity to movement caused by pole sway and other environmental concerns. To overcome this, we propose an efficient beam alignment technique using adaptive subspace sampling and hierarchical beam codebooks. A wind sway analysis is presented to establish a notion of beam coherence time. This highlights a previously unexplored tradeoff between array size and wind-induced movement. Generally, it is not possible to use larger arrays without risking a corresponding performance loss from wind-induced beam misalignment. The performance of the proposed alignment technique is analyzed and compared with other search and alignment methods. The results show significant performance improvement with reduced search time.

Millimeter Wave Beamforming for Wireless Backhaul and Access in Small Cell Networks

In recent years, free space optical (FSO) communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power, and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth’s atmosphere or inter-satellite/deep space links or ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground links. It also finds its applications in remote sensing, radio astronomy, military, disaster recovery, last mile access, backhaul for wireless cellular networks, and many more. However, despite of great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects (viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence) of the atmospheric channel. Out of these three effects, the atmospheric turbulence is a major challenge that may lead to serious degradation in the bit error rate performance of the system and make the communication link infeasible. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of this paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite/satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of this paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers (link, network, or transport layer) to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high capacity and low cost backhaul solutions.

/pdf/optical-communication-in-space-challenges-and-mitigation-41d8by09lh.pdf

Optical Communication in Space: Challenges and Mitigation Techniques

In recent years, free space optical communication has gained significant importance owing to its unique features: large bandwidth, license-free spectrum, high data rate, easy and quick deployability, less power and low mass requirements. FSO communication uses the optical carrier in the near infrared band to establish either terrestrial links within the Earth's atmosphere or inter-satellite or deep space links or ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground links. However, despite the great potential of FSO communication, its performance is limited by the adverse effects viz., absorption, scattering, and turbulence of the atmospheric channel. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on various challenges faced by FSO communication system for ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. It also provides details of various performance mitigation techniques in order to have high link availability and reliability. The first part of the paper will focus on various types of impairments that pose a serious challenge to the performance of optical communication system for ground-to-satellite or satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite links. The latter part of the paper will provide the reader with an exhaustive review of various techniques both at physical layer as well as at the other layers i.e., link, network or transport layer to combat the adverse effects of the atmosphere. It also uniquely presents a recently developed technique using orbital angular momentum for utilizing the high capacity advantage of the optical carrier in case of space-based and near-Earth optical communication links. This survey provides the reader with comprehensive details on the use of space-based optical backhaul links in order to provide high-capacity and low-cost backhaul solutions.

/pdf/optical-communication-in-space-challenges-and-mitigation-4wng3q8rfl.pdf

Growth in the number of mobile users, coupled with the strong uptake of wireless broadband services, is driving high transport capacity requirements among cellular networks. However, revenues are not scaling linearly with increases in traffic. Demand for optimizing the cost efficiency of backhaul is becoming as critical as investment in the radio infrastructure. As a result, new transmission technologies, topologies, and network architectures are emerging in an attempt to ease the backhaul cost and capacity crunch.

The next challenge for cellular networks: backhaul

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/6668/4560250/04561567.pdf

3G evolution

The paper states that community-based healthcare is increasingly important for the well-being of inhabitants of emerging economies. The community model is needed partly because roads are less developed, limiting patients ability to commute from distant villages to central medical facilities. Also, developing countries have a large rural population base. Some estimates are that rural agriculture employs 75% of the population in developing countries.The goal of an RFID-backed community healthcare solution is to enable easy and reliable identification of individual patients, maintain more accurate medical records, facilitate better healthcare, and enhance the quality of life in communities that are remote from a central medical facility. In addition, it can also help to relieve the workload pressure on the central medical facility when it is overcrowded and can increase revenue opportunities by broadening the base of patients to include more remote locations. It may also help to improve the efficiency of the central medical facility, allowing it to focus resources on cases that require more specialized attention and care.

Intelligent Technologies for Self-Sustaining, RFID-Based, Rural e-Health Systems

The mobile internet has finally arrived with the sky-rocketing usage increase of HSPA. LTE, WiMAX and evolved WiFi are the upcoming wireless standards which are based on OFDM and MIMO. The mentioned standards have already started the evolution process with LTE-Advanced, IEEE 802.16m and IEEE 802.11n. New technology building blocks are on its way like cooperative MIMO, relaying and self-organizing networks. Increase of data-rate is one target, but the energy consumption both on the terminal and network side are important as well. This paper discusses the challenges imposed by developments in the wireless industry. Advanced signal processing can play a major role in addressing these challenges.

Signal processing challenges for future wireless communications

Many clinics and health care facilities in rural and slum areas in India and elsewhere have limited or no patient records, and in some cases not even paper-based systems. This makes continued patient care challenging, with no history of previous conditions or medications.

Stanley Chia

Papers

The next challenge for cellular networks: backhaul

3G evolution

Intelligent Technologies for Self-Sustaining, RFID-Based, Rural e-Health Systems

Signal processing challenges for future wireless communications

RFID Individual Tracking and Records Management : Solutions for Slum Communities