No Arabic abstract
The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) recently started standardizing the Licensed-Assisted Access using LTE for small cells, referred to as Dual Band Femtocell (DBF) in this paper, which uses LTE air interface in both licensed and unlicensed bands based on the Long Term Evolution (LTE) carrier aggregation feature. Alternatively, the Small Cell Forum introduced the Integrated Femto-WiFi (IFW) small cell which simultaneously accesses both the licensed band (via cellular interface) and the unlicensed band (via WiFi interface). In this paper, a practical algorithm for IFW and DBF to automatically balance their traffic in licensed and unlicensed bands, based on the real-time channel, interference and traffic conditions of both bands is described. The algorithm considers the fact that some smart devices (sDevices) have both cellular and WiFi radios while some WiFi-only devices (wDevices) may only have WiFi radio. In addition, the algorithm considers a realistic scenario where a single small cell user may simultaneously use multiple sDevices and wDevices via either the IFW, or the DBF in conjunction with a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). The goal is to maximize the total user satisfaction/utility of the small cell user, while keeping the interference from small cell to macrocell below predefined thresholds. The algorithm can be implemented at the Radio Link Control (RLC) or the network layer of the IFW and DBF small cell base stations. Results demonstrate that the proposed traffic-balancing algorithm applied to either IFW or DBF significantly increases sum utility of all macrocell and small cell users, compared with the current practices. Finally, various implementation issues of IFW and DBF are addressed.
In future networks, an operator may employ a wide range of access points using diverse radio access technologies (RATs) over multiple licensed and unlicensed frequency bands. This paper studies centralized user association and spectrum allocation across many access points in such a heterogeneous network (HetNet). Such centralized control is on a relatively slow timescale to allow information exchange and joint optimization over multiple cells. This is in contrast and complementary to fast timescale distributed scheduling. A queueing model is introduced to capture the lower spectral efficiency, reliability, and additional delays of data transmission over the unlicensed bands due to contention and/or listen-before-talk requirements. Two optimization-based spectrum allocation schemes are proposed along with efficient algorithms for computing the allocations. The proposed solutions are fully aware of traffic loads, network topology, as well as external interference levels in the unlicensed bands. Packet-level simulation results show that the proposed schemes significantly outperform orthogonal and full-frequency-reuse allocations under all traffic conditions.
Small cells deployed in licensed spectrum and unlicensed access via WiFi provide different ways of expanding wireless services to low mobility users. That reduces the demand for conventional macro-cellular networks, which are better suited for wide-area mobile coverage. The mix of these technologies seen in practice depends in part on the decisions made by wireless service providers that seek to maximize revenue, and allocations of licensed and unlicensed spectrum by regulators. To understand these interactions we present a model in which a service provider allocates available licensed spectrum across two separate bands, one for macro- and one for small-cells, in order to serve two types of users: mobile and fixed. We assume a service model in which the providers can charge a (different) price per unit rate for each type of service (macro- or small-cell); unlicensed access is free. With this setup we study how the addition of unlicensed spectrum affects prices and the optimal allocation of bandwidth across macro-/small-cells. We also characterize the optimal fraction of unlicensed spectrum when new bandwidth becomes available.
License-assisted access (LAA) is a promising technology to offload dramatically increasing cellular traffic to unlicensed bands. Challenges arise from the provision of quality-of-service (QoS) and the quantification of capacity, due to the distributed and heterogeneous nature of LAA and legacy systems (such as WiFi) coexisting in the bands. In this paper, we develop new theories of the effective capacity to measure LAA under statistical QoS requirements. A new four-state semi-Markovian model is developed to capture transmission collisions, random backoffs, and lossy wireless channels of LAA in distributed heterogeneous network environments. A closed-form expression for the effective capacity is derived to comprehensively analyze LAA. The four-state model is further abstracted to an insightful two-state equivalent which reveals the concavity of the effective capacity in terms of transmit rate. Validated by simulations, the concavity is exploited to maximize the effective capacity and effective energy efficiency of LAA, and provide significant improvements of 62.7% and 171.4%, respectively, over existing approaches. Our results are of practical value to holistic designs and deployments of LAA systems.
In this paper, two modulation schemes based on complementary sequences (CSs) are proposed for uplink control channels in unlicensed bands. These schemes address high peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR) under non-contiguous resource allocation in the frequency domain and reduce the maximum PAPR to 3 dB. The first scheme allows the users to transmit a small amount of uplink control information (UCI) such as acknowledgment signals and does not introduce a trade-off between PAPR and co-channel interference (CCI). The second scheme, which enables up to 21 UCI bits for a single user or 11 UCI bits for three users in an interlace, is based on a new theorem introduced in this paper. This theorem leads distinct CSs compatible with a wide variety of resource allocations while capturing the inherent relationship between CSs and Reed-Muller (RM) codes, which makes CSs more useful for practical systems. The numerical results show that the proposed schemes maintain the low-PAPR benefits without increasing the error rate for non-contiguous resource allocations in the frequency domain.
Three dimensional (3D) resource reuse is an important design requirement for the prospective 6G wireless communication systems. Hence, we propose a cooperative 3D beamformer for use in 3D space. Explicitly, we harness multiple base station antennas for joint zero forcing transmit pre-coding for beaming the transmit signals in specific 3D directions. The technique advocated is judiciously configured for use in both cell-based and cell-free wireless architectures. We evaluated the performance of the proposed scheme using the novel metric of Volumetric Spectral Efficiency (VSE). We also characterized the performance of the scheme in terms of its spectral efficiency (SE) and Bit Error Rate (BER) through extensive simulation studies.