Showing papers on "Base station published in 2016"

Wireless communications with unmanned aerial vehicles: opportunities and challenges

Abstract: Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms, on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly reconfigured, and likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also introduces many new challenges. In this article, we provide an overview of UAV-aided wireless communications, by introducing the basic networking architecture and main channel characteristics, highlighting the key design considerations as well as the new opportunities to be exploited.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle With Underlaid Device-to-Device Communications: Performance and Tradeoffs

Abstract: In this paper, the deployment of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as a flying base station used to provide the fly wireless communications to a given geographical area is analyzed. In particular, the coexistence between the UAV, that is transmitting data in the downlink, and an underlaid device-to-device (D2D) communication network is considered. For this model, a tractable analytical framework for the coverage and rate analysis is derived. Two scenarios are considered: a static UAV and a mobile UAV. In the first scenario, the average coverage probability and the system sum-rate for the users in the area are derived as a function of the UAV altitude and the number of D2D users. In the second scenario, using the disk covering problem, the minimum number of stop points that the UAV needs to visit in order to completely cover the area is computed. Furthermore, considering multiple retransmissions for the UAV and D2D users, the overall outage probability of the D2D users is derived. Simulation and analytical results show that, depending on the density of D2D users, the optimal values for the UAV altitude, which lead to the maximum system sum-rate and coverage probability, exist. Moreover, our results also show that, by enabling the UAV to intelligently move over the target area, the total required transmit power of UAV while covering the entire area, can be minimized. Finally, in order to provide full coverage for the area of interest, the tradeoff between the coverage and delay, in terms of the number of stop points, is discussed.

Efficient 3-D placement of an aerial base station in next generation cellular networks

Abstract: Agility and resilience requirements of future cellular networks may not be fully satisfied by terrestrial base stations in cases of unexpected or temporary events. A promising solution is assisting the cellular network via low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with base stations, i.e., drone-cells. Although drone-cells provide a quick deployment opportunity as aerial base stations, efficient placement becomes one of the key issues. In addition to mobility of the drone-cells in the vertical dimension as well as the horizontal dimension, the differences between the air-to-ground and terrestrial channels cause the placement of the drone-cells to diverge from placement of terrestrial base stations. In this paper, we first highlight the properties of the drone-cell placement problem, and formulate it as a 3-D placement problem with the objective of maximizing the revenue of the network. After some mathematical manipulations, we formulate an equivalent quadratically-constrained mixed integer non-linear optimization problem and propose a computationally efficient numerical solution for this problem. We verify our analytical derivations with numerical simulations and enrich them with discussions which could serve as guidelines for researchers, mobile network operators, and policy makers.

Wireless Device-to-Device Caching Networks: Basic Principles and System Performance

Abstract: As wireless video is the fastest growing form of data traffic, methods for spectrally efficient on-demand wireless video streaming are essential to both service providers and users. A key property of video on-demand is the asynchronous content reuse , such that a few popular files account for a large part of the traffic but are viewed by users at different times. Caching of content on wireless devices in conjunction with device-to-device (D2D) communications allows to exploit this property, and provide a network throughput that is significantly in excess of both the conventional approach of unicasting from cellular base stations and the traditional D2D networks for “regular” data traffic. This paper presents in a tutorial and concise form some recent results on the throughput scaling laws of wireless networks with caching and asynchronous content reuse, contrasting the D2D approach with other alternative approaches such as conventional unicasting, harmonic broadcasting , and a novel coded multicasting approach based on caching in the user devices and network-coded transmission from the cellular base station only. Somehow surprisingly, the D2D scheme with spatial reuse and simple decentralized random caching achieves the same near-optimal throughput scaling law as coded multicasting. Both schemes achieve an unbounded throughput gain (in terms of scaling law) with respect to conventional unicasting and harmonic broadcasting, in the relevant regime where the number of video files in the library is smaller than the total size of the distributed cache capacity in the network. To better understand the relative merits of these competing approaches, we consider a holistic D2D system design incorporating traditional microwave (2 GHz) and millimeter-wave (mm-wave) D2D links; the direct connections to the base station can be used to provide those rare video requests that cannot be found in local caches. We provide extensive simulation results under a variety of system settings and compare our scheme with the systems that exploit transmission from the base station only. We show that, also in realistic conditions and nonasymptotic regimes, the proposed D2D approach offers very significant throughput gains.

Fundamental Limits of Caching in Wireless D2D Networks

Abstract: We consider a wireless device-to-device (D2D) network where communication is restricted to be single-hop. Users make arbitrary requests from a finite library of files and have pre-cached information on their devices, subject to a per-node storage capacity constraint. A similar problem has already been considered in an infrastructure setting, where all users receive a common multicast (coded) message from a single omniscient server (e.g., a base station having all the files in the library) through a shared bottleneck link. In this paper, we consider a D2D infrastructureless version of the problem. We propose a caching strategy based on deterministic assignment of subpackets of the library files, and a coded delivery strategy where the users send linearly coded messages to each other in order to collectively satisfy their demands. We also consider a random caching strategy, which is more suitable to a fully decentralized implementation. Under certain conditions, both approaches can achieve the information theoretic outer bound within a constant multiplicative factor. In our previous work, we showed that a caching D2D wireless network with one-hop communication, random caching, and uncoded delivery (direct file transmissions) achieves the same throughput scaling law of the infrastructure-based coded multicasting scheme, in the regime of large number of users and files in the library. This shows that the spatial reuse gain of the D2D network is order-equivalent to the coded multicasting gain of single base station transmission. It is, therefore, natural to ask whether these two gains are cumulative, i.e., if a D2D network with both local communication (spatial reuse) and coded multicasting can provide an improved scaling law. Somewhat counterintuitively, we show that these gains do not cumulate (in terms of throughput scaling law). This fact can be explained by noticing that the coded delivery scheme creates messages that are useful to multiple nodes, such that it benefits from broadcasting to as many nodes as possible, while spatial reuse capitalizes on the fact that the communication is local, such that the same time slot can be reused in space across the network. Unfortunately, these two issues are in contrast with each other.

Massive MIMO for Maximal Spectral Efficiency: How Many Users and Pilots Should Be Allocated?

Abstract: Massive MIMO is a promising technique for increasing the spectral efficiency (SE) of cellular networks, by deploying antenna arrays with hundreds or thousands of active elements at the base stations and performing coherent transceiver processing. A common rule-of-thumb is that these systems should have an order of magnitude more antennas $M$ than scheduled users $K$ because the users’ channels are likely to be near-orthogonal when $M/K > 10$ . However, it has not been proved that this rule-of-thumb actually maximizes the SE. In this paper, we analyze how the optimal number of scheduled users $K^\star$ depends on $M$ and other system parameters. To this end, new SE expressions are derived to enable efficient system-level analysis with power control, arbitrary pilot reuse, and random user locations. The value of $K^\star$ in the large- $M$ regime is derived in closed form, while simulations are used to show what happens at finite $M$ , in different interference scenarios, with different pilot reuse factors, and for different processing schemes. Up to half the coherence block should be dedicated to pilots and the optimal $M/K$ is less than 10 in many cases of practical relevance. Interestingly, $K^\star$ depends strongly on the processing scheme and hence it is unfair to compare different schemes using the same $K$ .

Cooperative Non-orthogonal Multiple Access With Simultaneous Wireless Information and Power Transfer

Abstract: In this paper, the application of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) to nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks in which users are spatially randomly located is investigated. A new co-operative SWIPT NOMA protocol is proposed, in which near NOMA users that are close to the source act as energy harvesting relays to help far NOMA users. Since the locations of users have a significant impact on the performance, three user selection schemes based on the user distances from the base station are proposed. To characterize the performance of the proposed selection schemes, closed-form expressions for the outage probability and system throughput are derived. These analytical results demonstrate that the use of SWIPT will not jeopardize the diversity gain compared to the conventional NOMA. The proposed results confirm that the opportunistic use of node locations for user selection can achieve low outage probability and deliver superior throughput in comparison to the random selection scheme.

Caching at the wireless edge: design aspects, challenges, and future directions

Abstract: Caching at the wireless edge is a promising way to boost spectral efficiency and reduce energy consumption of wireless systems. These improvements are rooted in the fact that popular contents are reused, asynchronously, by many users. In this article we first introduce methods to predict the popularity distributions and user preferences, and the impact of erroneous information. We then discuss the two aspects of caching systems, content placement and delivery. We expound the key differences between wired and wireless caching, and outline the differences in the system arising from where the caching takes place (e.g., at base stations or on the wireless devices themselves). Special attention is paid to the essential limitations in wireless caching, and possible trade-offs between spectral efficiency, energy efficiency, and cache size.

Energy Efficient Mobile Cloud Computing Powered by Wireless Energy Transfer

Abstract: Achieving long battery lives or even self sustainability has been a long standing challenge for designing mobile devices. This paper presents a novel solution that seamlessly integrates two technologies, mobile cloud computing and microwave power transfer (MPT), to enable computation in passive low-complexity devices such as sensors and wearable computing devices. Specifically, considering a single-user system, a base station (BS) either transfers power to or offloads computation from a mobile to the cloud; the mobile uses harvested energy to compute given data either locally or by offloading. A framework for energy efficient computing is proposed that comprises a set of policies for controlling CPU cycles for the mode of local computing, time division between MPT and offloading for the other mode of offloading, and mode selection. Given the CPU-cycle statistics information and channel state information (CSI), the policies aim at maximizing the probability of successfully computing given data, called computing probability , under the energy harvesting and deadline constraints. The policy optimization is translated into the equivalent problems of minimizing the mobile energy consumption for local computing and maximizing the mobile energy savings for offloading which are solved using convex optimization theory. The structures of the resultant policies are characterized in closed form. Furthermore, given non-causal CSI, the said analytical framework is further developed to support computation load allocation over multiple channel realizations, which further increases the computing probability. Last, simulation demonstrates the feasibility of wirelessly powered mobile cloud computing and the gain of its optimal control.

On the Number and 3D Placement of Drone Base Stations in Wireless Cellular Networks

Abstract: Using drone base stations (drone-BSs) in wireless networks has started attracting attention. Drone-BSs can assist the ground BSs in both capacity and coverage enhancement. One of the important problems about integrating drone-BSs to cellular networks is the management of their placement to satisfy the dynamic system requirements. In this paper, we propose a method to find the positions of drone-BSs in an area with different user densities using a heuristic algorithm. The goal is to find the minimum number of drone-BSs and their 3D placement so that all the users are served. Our simulation results show that the proposed approach can satisfy the quality-of-service requirements of the network.

Analysis of Capacity and Scalability of the LoRa Low Power Wide Area Network Technology

Abstract: In this paper we discuss and analyze the recently proposed LoRa low power wide area network (LPWAN) technology when used under the European frequency regulations First of all, we derive the performance metrics of a single LoRaWAN end device, namely uplink throughput and data transmission time Then we analyze for several illustrative application scenarios the maximum number of end devices which can be served by a single LoRaWAN base station and discuss the spatial distribution of these devices It is shown that subject to the channel composition and application requirements, a single cell may include several millions of devices Also, we show that the capacity of the uplink channel available to a LoRaWAN node strongly depends on the distance from the base station and does not exceed 2 kbit/s In the concluding section we summarize and discuss the obtained results, and point out few issues which need to be taken into account when making an application using LoRa or deploying a LoRa network

Nonorthogonal Multiple Access in Large-Scale Underlay Cognitive Radio Networks

Abstract: In this paper, nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is applied to large-scale underlay cognitive radio (CR) networks with randomly deployed users. To characterize the performance of the considered network, new closed-form expressions of the outage probability are derived using stochastic geometry. More importantly, by carrying out the diversity analysis, new insights are obtained under the two scenarios with different power constraints: 1) fixed transmit power of the primary transmitters (PTs); and 2) transmit power of the PTs being proportional to that of the secondary base station. For the first scenario, a diversity order of m is experienced at the mth-ordered NOMA user. For the second scenario, there is an asymptotic error floor for the outage probability. Simulation results are provided to verify the accuracy of the derived results. A pivotal conclusion is reached that by carefully designing target data rates and power allocation coefficients of users, NOMA can outperform conventional orthogonal multiple access in underlay CR networks.

Initial Access in 5G mmWave Cellular Networks

Abstract: The massive amounts of bandwidth available at millimeter-wave frequencies (above 10 GHz) have the potential to greatly increase the capacity of fifth generation cellular wireless systems. However, to overcome the high isotropic propagation loss experienced at these frequencies, highly directional antennas will be required at both the base station and the mobile terminal to achieve sufficient link budget in wide area networks. This reliance on directionality has important implications for control layer procedures. In particular, initial access can be significantly delayed due to the need for the base station and the user to find the proper alignment for directional transmission and reception. This article provides a survey of several recently proposed techniques for this purpose. A coverage and delay analysis is performed to compare various techniques including exhaustive and iterative search, and context-information-based algorithms. We show that the best strategy depends on the target SNR regime, and provide guidelines to characterize the optimal choice as a function of the system parameters.

User terminal, wireless base station, and wireless communication method

Abstract: In order that a user terminal properly identifies a connection cell in a radio communication system (LTE-U) for operating LTE in an unlicensed band, a user terminal for communicating with a radio base station in an unlicensed band is provided with a detection section that detects a synchronization signal transmitted from a radio base station using a dummy cell ID used in common among a plurality of radio base stations, an estimation section that performs channel estimation using a reference signal, and a reception processing section that performs reception processing of system information transmitted from a radio base station using a channel estimation result.

Remote distributed antenna system

Abstract: A distributed antenna system is provided that frequency shifts the output of one or more microcells to a 60 GHz or higher frequency range for transmission to a set of distributed antennas. The cellular band outputs of these microcell base station devices are used to modulate a 60 GHz (or higher) carrier wave, yielding a group of subcarriers on the 60 GHz carrier wave. This group will then be transmitted in the air via analog microwave RF unit, after which it can be repeated or radiated to the surrounding area. The repeaters amplify the signal and resend it on the air again toward the next repeater. In places where a microcell is required, the 60 GHz signal is shifted in frequency back to its original frequency (e.g., the 1.9 GHz cellular band) and radiated locally to nearby mobile devices.

Analysis on Cache-Enabled Wireless Heterogeneous Networks

Abstract: Caching popular multimedia content is a promising way to unleash the ultimate potential of wireless networks. In this paper, we propose and analyze cache-based content delivery in a three-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet), where base stations (BSs), relays, and device-to-device (D2D) pairs are included. We advocate proactively caching popular content in the relays and parts of the users with caching ability when the network is off-peak. The cached content can be reused for frequent access to offload the cellular network traffic. The node locations are first modeled as mutually independent Poisson point processes (PPPs) and the corresponding content access protocol is developed. The average ergodic rate and outage probability in the downlink are then analyzed theoretically. We further derive the throughput and the delay based on the multiclass processor-sharing queue model and the continuous-time Markov process. According to the critical condition of the steady state in the HetNet, the maximum traffic load and the global throughput gain are investigated. Moreover, impacts of some key network characteristics, e.g., the heterogeneity of multimedia contents, node densities, and the limited caching capacities, on the system performance are elaborated on to provide valuable insight.

Minimizing the Age of Information in broadcast wireless networks

Abstract: We consider a wireless broadcast network with a base station sending time-sensitive information to a number of clients. The Age of Information (AoI), namely the amount of time that elapsed since the most recently delivered packet was generated, captures the freshness of the information. We formulate a discrete-time decision problem to find a scheduling policy that minimizes the expected weighted sum AoI of the clients in the network. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to provide a scheduling policy that optimizes AoI in a wireless network with unreliable channels. The results are twofold: first, we show that a Greedy Policy, which transmits the packet with highest current age, is optimal for the case of symmetric networks. Then, for the general network case, we establish that the problem is indexable and obtain the Whittle Index in closed-form. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the policies.

Waveform and Numerology to Support 5G Services and Requirements

Abstract: The standardization of the next generation 5G radio access technology has just started in 3GPP with the ambition of making it commercially available by 2020. There are a number of features that are unique for 5G radio access compared to the previous generations such as a wide range of carrier frequencies and deployment options, diverse use cases with very different user requirements, small-size base stations, self-backhaul, massive MIMO, and large channel bandwidths. In this article, we propose a flexible physical layer for the NR to meet the 5G requirements. A symmetric physical layer design with OFDM is proposed for all link types, including uplink, downlink, device-to-device, and backhaul. A scalable OFDM waveform is proposed to handle the wide range of carrier frequencies and deployments.

Method and apparatus for use with a radio distributed antenna system having a clock reference

Abstract: Aspects of the subject disclosure may include, for example, receiving, by a network element of a distributed antenna system, a clock signal, a control channel and a first modulated signal at a first carrier frequency, the first modulated signal including first communications data provided by a base station and directed to a mobile communication device. The clock signal synchronizes timing of digital control channel processing by the network element to recover instructions from the control channel. The instructions in the control channel direct the network element of the distributed antenna system to convert the first modulated signal at the first carrier frequency to the first modulated signal in a first spectral segment. Other embodiments are disclosed.

Wireless Content Caching for Small Cell and D2D Networks

Abstract: The fifth generation wireless networks must provide fast and reliable connectivity while coping with the ongoing traffic growth. It is of paramount importance that the required resources, such as energy and bandwidth, do not scale with traffic. While the aggregate network traffic is growing at an unprecedented rate, users tend to request the same popular contents at different time instants. Therefore, caching the most popular contents at the network edge is a promising solution to reduce the traffic and the energy consumption over the backhaul links. In this paper, two scenarios are considered, where caching is performed either at a small base station, or directly at the user terminals, which communicate using Device-to-Device (D2D) communications. In both scenarios, joint design of the transmission and caching policies is studied when the user demands are known in advance. This joint design offers two different caching gains, namely, the pre-downloading and local caching gains . It is shown that the finite cache capacity limits the attainable gains, and creates an inherent tradeoff between the two types of gains. In this context, a continuous time optimization problem is formulated to determine the optimal transmission and caching policies that minimize a generic cost function, such as energy, bandwidth, or throughput. The jointly optimal solution is obtained by demonstrating that caching files at a constant rate is optimal, which allows reformulation of the problem as a finite-dimensional convex program. The numerical results show that the proposed joint transmission and caching policy dramatically reduces the total cost, which is particularised to the total energy consumption at the Macro Base Station (MBS), as well as to the total economical cost for the service provider, when users demand economical incentives for delivering content to other users over the D2D links.

Multi-User Shared Access for Internet of Things

Abstract: Internet of things (IoT) is widely expected to be an important scenario in the fifth generation (5G) wireless network. Major challenges of IoT include the low cost of devices, low energy consumption, low latency and the ability to support a large number of simultaneous connections. In this article, a new type of non-orthogonal multiple access scheme called multi-user shared access (MUSA) is proposed to support IoT. MUSA adopts a grant-free access strategy to simplify the access procedure significantly and utilizes advanced code domain non-orthogonal complex spreading to accommodate massive number of users in the same radio resources. A family of complex sequences with short length is chosen as spreading sequence for its ability to enable simple and robust successive interference cancellation at the base station side and cope with high user load. Simulation results show that MUSA can achieve significant gain in user overloading performance compared to orthogonal systems, while incurring much lower control overhead.

Cyclical Multiple Access in UAV-Aided Communications: A Throughput-Delay Tradeoff

Abstract: This letter studies a wireless system consisting of distributed ground terminals (GTs) communicating with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that serves as a mobile base station (BS). The UAV flies cyclically above the GTs at a fixed altitude, which results in a cyclical pattern of the strength of the UAV-GT channels. To exploit such periodic channel variations, we propose a new cyclical multiple access (CMA) scheme to schedule the communications between the UAV and GTs in a cyclical time-division manner based on the flying UAV’s position. The time allocations to different GTs are optimized to maximize their minimum throughput. It is revealed that there is a fundamental tradeoff between throughput and access delay in the proposed CMA. Simulation results show significant throughput gains over the case of a static UAV BS in delay-tolerant applications.

Compressive Channel Estimation and Tracking for Large Arrays in mm-Wave Picocells

Abstract: We propose and investigate a compressive architecture for estimation and tracking of sparse spatial channels in millimeter (mm) wave picocellular networks. The base stations are equipped with antenna arrays with a large number of elements (which can fit within compact form factors because of the small carrier wavelength) and employ radio frequency (RF) beamforming, so that standard least squares adaptation techniques (which require access to individual antenna elements) are not applicable. We focus on the downlink, and show that “compressive beacons,” transmitted using pseudorandom phase settings at the base station array, and compressively processed using pseudorandom phase settings at the mobile array, provide information sufficient for accurate estimation of the two-dimensional (2D) spatial frequencies associated with the directions of departure of the dominant rays from the base station, and the associated complex gains. This compressive approach is compatible with coarse phase-only control, and is based on a near-optimal sequential algorithm for frequency estimation which approaches the Cramer Rao Lower Bound. The algorithm exploits the geometric continuity of the channel across successive beaconing intervals to reduce the overhead to less than 1% even for very large ( $32 \times 32$ ) arrays. Compressive beaconing is essentially omnidirectional, and hence does not enjoy the SNR and spatial reuse benefits of beamforming obtained during data transmission. We therefore discuss system level design considerations for ensuring that the beacon SNR is sufficient for accurate channel estimation, and that inter-cell beacon interference is controlled by an appropriate reuse scheme.

Range and coexistence analysis of long range unlicensed communication

Abstract: A broad range of emerging applications require very low power, very long range yet low throughput communication. Different standards are being proposed to meet these novel requirements. In this paper, the technical differences between a wideband spread spectrum (LoRa-like) and an ultra narrowband (Sigfox-like) network will be explained and evaluated. On the physical layer, simulation results show that an ultra narrowband network has a larger coverage, while wideband spread spectrum networks are less sensitive to interference. When considering the contention between nodes and interference between different networks, simulations show that adaptation of frequency and modulation is imperative for efficiently dealing with varying contention and interference in long range unlicensed networks. Depending on network load, size and distance, a device in a wideband network can send 6 times more packets to the base station when there is active rate and frequency management and an intra-technology control plane.

Mobility-aware caching for content-centric wireless networks: modeling and methodology

Abstract: As mobile services are shifting from connection- centric communications to content-centric communications, content-centric wireless networking emerges as a promising paradigm to evolve the current network architecture Caching popular content at the wireless edge, including base stations and user terminals, provides an effective approach to alleviate the heavy burden on backhaul links, as well as lower delays and deployment costs In contrast to wired networks, a unique characteristic of content-centric wireless networks (CCWNs) is the mobility of mobile users While it has rarely been considered by existing works on caching design, user mobility contains various helpful side information that can be exploited to improve caching efficiency at both BSs and user terminals In this article, we present a general framework for mobility-aware caching in CCWNs Key properties of user mobility patterns that are useful for content caching are first identified, and then different design methodologies for mobility-aware caching are proposed Moreover, two design examples are provided to illustrate the proposed framework in detail, and interesting future research directions are identified

Cloud radio access network: Virtualizing wireless access for dense heterogeneous systems

Abstract: Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) refers to the visualization of base station functionalities by means of cloud computing. This results in a novel cellular architecture in which low-cost wireless access points, known as radio units or remote radio heads, are centrally managed by a reconfigurable centralized "cloud", or central, unit. C-RAN allows operators to reduce the capital and operating expenses needed to deploy and maintain dense heterogeneous networks. This critical advantage, along with spectral efficiency, statistical multiplexing and load balancing gains, make C-RAN well positioned to be one of the key technologies in the development of 5G systems. In this paper, a succinct overview is presented regarding the state of the art on the research on C-RAN with emphasis on fronthaul compression, baseband processing, medium access control, resource allocation, system-level considerations and standardization efforts.

On the Outage Probability of Device-to-Device-Communication-Enabled Multichannel Cellular Networks: An RSS-Threshold-Based Perspective

Abstract: In this paper, we study the outage probability of device-to-device (D2D)-communication-enabled cellular networks from a general threshold-based perspective. Specifically, a mobile user equipment (UE) transmits in D2D mode if the received signal strength (RSS) from the nearest base station (BS) is less than a specified threshold $\beta \ge 0$ ; otherwise, it connects to the nearest BS and transmits in cellular mode. The RSS-threshold-based setting is general in the sense that by varying $\beta$ from $\beta = 0$ to $\beta = \infty$ , the network accordingly evolves from a traditional cellular network (including only cellular mode) toward a wireless ad hoc network (including only D2D mode). We provide a unified framework to analyze the downlink outage probability in a multichannel environment with Rayleigh fading, where the spatial distributions of BSs and UEs are well explicitly accounted for by utilizing stochastic geometry. We derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability of a generic UE and that in both cellular mode and D2D mode and quantify the performance gains in outage probability that can be obtained by allowing such RSS-threshold-based D2D communications. We show that increasing the number of channels, although able to support more cellular UEs, may result in an increase of outage probability in the D2D-enabled cellular network. The corresponding condition and reason are also identified by applying our framework.

Optimal User-Cell Association for Massive MIMO Wireless Networks

Abstract: Massive MIMO is one of the most promising approaches for coping with the predicted wireless data traffic explosion. Future deployment scenarios will involve dense heterogeneous networks, comprised of massive MIMO base stations with different powers, numbers of antennas and multiplexing gain capabilities, and possibly highly nonhomogeneous user density (hot-spots). In such dense irregularly deployed networks, it will be important to have mechanisms for associating users to base stations so that the available wireless infrastructure is efficiently used. In this paper, we consider the optimal user-cell association problem for massive MIMO heterogeneous networks and illustrate how massive MIMO can also provide nontrivial advantages at the system level. Unlike previous treatments that rely on integer program problem formulations and their convex relaxations, the user-cell association problem is formulated directly as a convex network utility maximization and solved efficiently by a centralized subgradient algorithm. As we show, the globally optimal solution is physically realizable , in that there exists a sequence of integer-valued associations approaching arbitrarily closely the optimal fractional association. We also consider simple decentralized user-centric association schemes, where each user individually and selfishly connects to the base station with the highest promised throughput. Such user-centric schemes where users make local association decisions in a probabilistic manner can be viewed as games and are known to converge to Nash equilibria. Surprisingly, as we show, under certain conditions, the globally optimal solution is close to these Nash equilibria. Such decentralized approaches are, therefore, attractive not only for their simplicity, but also because they operate near the system social optimum. Our theoretical results are confirmed by extensive simulations with realistic LTE-like network parameters.

Mobile Internet of Things: Can UAVs Provide an Energy-Efficient Mobile Architecture?

Abstract: In this paper, the optimal trajectory and deployment of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), used as aerial base stations to collect data from ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is investigated. In particular, to enable reliable uplink communications for IoT devices with a minimum energy consumption, a new approach for optimal mobility of the UAVs is proposed. First, given a fixed ground IoT network, the total transmit power of the devices is minimized by properly clustering the IoT devices with each cluster being served by one UAV. Next, to maintain energy-efficient communications in time-varying mobile IoT networks, the optimal trajectories of the UAVs are determined by exploiting the framework of optimal transport theory. Simulation results show that by using the proposed approach, the total transmit power of IoT devices for reliable uplink communications can be reduced by 56% compared to the fixed Voronoi deployment method. Moreover, our results yield the optimal paths that will be used by UAVs to serve the mobile IoT devices with a minimum energy consumption.

Why to decouple the uplink and downlink in cellular networks and how to do it

Abstract: Ever since the inception of mobile telephony, the downlink and uplink of cellular networks have been coupled, that is, mobile terminals have been constrained to associate with the same base station in both the downlink and uplink directions. New trends in network densification and mobile data usage increase the drawbacks of this constraint, and suggest that it should be revisited. In this article we identify and explain five key arguments in favor of downlink/uplink decoupling based on a blend of theoretical, experimental, and architectural insights. We then overview the changes needed in current LTE-A mobile systems to enable this decoupling, and then look ahead to fifth generation cellular standards. We demonstrate that decoupling can lead to significant gains in network throughput, outage, and power consumption at a much lower cost compared to other solutions that provide comparable or lower gains.