Wireless Communications

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective

It is shown that, particularly for terrestrial cellular telephony, the interference-suppression feature of CDMA (code division multiple access) can result in a many-fold increase in capacity over analog and even over competing digital techniques. A single-cell system, such as a hubbed satellite network, is addressed, and the basic expression for capacity is developed. The corresponding expressions for a multiple-cell system are derived. and the distribution on the number of users supportable per cell is determined. It is concluded that properly augmented and power-controlled multiple-cell CDMA promises a quantum increase in current cellular capacity. >

On the capacity of a cellular CDMA system

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

The increasing demand of mobile Internet and the Internet of Things poses challenging requirements for 5G wireless communications, such as high spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. In this article, a promising technology, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), is discussed, which can address some of these challenges for 5G. Different from conventional orthogonal multiple access technologies, NOMA can accommodate much more users via nonorthogonal resource allocation. We divide existing dominant NOMA schemes into two categories: power-domain multiplexing and code-domain multiplexing, and the corresponding schemes include power-domain NOMA, multiple access with low-density spreading, sparse code multiple access, multi-user shared access, pattern division multiple access, and so on. We discuss their principles, key features, and pros/cons, and then provide a comprehensive comparison of these solutions from the perspective of spectral efficiency, system performance, receiver complexity, and so on. In addition, challenges, opportunities, and future research trends for NOMA design are highlighted to provide some insight on the potential future work for researchers in this field. Finally, to leverage different multiple access schemes including both conventional OMA and new NOMA, we propose the concept of software defined multiple access (SoDeMA), which enables adaptive configuration of available multiple access schemes to support diverse services and applications in future 5G networks.

Non-orthogonal multiple access for 5G: solutions, challenges, opportunities, and future research trends

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

Distributed antenna systems (DAS) have been widely implemented in state-of-the art cellular communication systems to cover dead spots. Recent academic studies have shown that in addition to coverage improvements, DAS can also have potential advantages such as reduced power and increased system capacity in a single cell environment. This paper analytically quantifies downlink capacity of multicell DAS for two different transmission strategies: selection diversity (where just one or two of the distributed antennas are used) and blanket transmission (where all antennas in the cell broadcast data). Simple repeaters are a special case of our analysis. A generalized information theoretic analysis is provided to illuminate the fundamental limits of such systems in the cellular context. The results show that DAS reduces other-cell interference in a multicell environment and hence significantly improves capacity (by about 2x), with particularly large improvements for users near cell boundaries. Less obviously, from a communication theory standpoint, it is shown that selection diversity is preferable to blanket transmission in terms of achievable ergodic capacity. For blanket transmission, we show that the optimal transmission strategy is just phase steering due to the per antenna module power constraints in DAS

Downlink performance and capacity of distributed antenna systems in a multicell environment

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 backwards compatibility. And 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. But 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.

Multi-antenna transmission and reception (known as MIMO) is widely touted as the key technology for enabling wireless broadband services, whose widespread success will require 10 times higher spectral efficiency than current cellular systems, at 10 times lower cost per bit. Spectrally efficient, inexpensive cellular systems are by definition densely populated and interference-limited. But spatial multiplexing MIMO systems- whose principal merit is a supposed dramatic increase in spectral efficiency- lose much of their effectiveness in high levels of interference. This article overviews several approaches to handling interference in multicell MIMO systems. The discussion is applicable to any multi-antenna cellular network, including 802.16e/WiMAX, 3GPP (HSDPA and 3GPP LTE), and 3GPP2 (lxEVDO). We argue that many of the traditional interference management techniques have limited usefulness (or are even counterproductive) when viewed in concert with MIMO. The problem of interference in MIMO systems is too large in scope to be handled with a single technique: in practice a combination of complementary countermeasures will be needed. We overview emerging system-level interference-reducing strategies based on cooperation, which will be important for overcoming interference in future spatial multiplexing cellular systems.

Overcoming interference in spatial multiplexing MIMO cellular networks

We investigate the effects of multi-user diversity in a spectrum sharing system where secondary users restrictively utilize a spectrum licensed to primary users only if interference perceived at primary users is regulated below a predetermined level. This interference regulation affects the characteristics of multiuser diversity gains previously known in non-spectrum sharing systems. Our numerical and analytical results show that the multiuser diversity gain in a spectrum sharing system increases differently according to conditions given by the transmit power of secondary users, P, and a predetermined interference temperature, Q - if P is sufficiently larger than Q, the multiuser diversity gain in terms of capacity scales like log2 (W (Ns)) similarly to a previously known scaling law in the non-spectrum sharing systems, where W(middot) and Ns denote a Lambert W function and the number of secondary transmitters, respectively. However, the scaling law of multiuser diversity gain becomes log2(Ns) as P becomes sufficiently larger such that P Gt QNs.

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Wan Choi

Papers

What Will 5G Be

Downlink performance and capacity of distributed antenna systems in a multicell environment

What Will 5G Be

Overcoming interference in spatial multiplexing MIMO cellular networks

Multi-user diversity in a spectrum sharing system