No Arabic abstract
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 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.
The evolution of conventional wireless communication networks to the fifth generation (5G) is driven by an explosive increase in the number of wireless mobile devices and services, as well as their demand for all-time and everywhere connectivity, high data rates, low latency, high energy-efficiency and improved quality of service. To address these challenges, 5G relies on key technologies, such as full duplex (FD), device-to-device (D2D) communications, and network densification. In this article, a heterogeneous networking architecture is envisioned, where cells of different sizes and radio access technologies coexist. Specifically, collaboration for spectrum access is explored for both FD- and cognitive-based approaches, and cooperation among devices is discussed in the context of the state-of-the-art D2D assisted communication paradigm. The presented cooperative framework is expected to advance the understandings of the critical technical issues towards dynamic spectrum management for 5G heterogeneous networks.
The unlicensed spectrum is recently considered one of the defining solutions to meet the steadily growing traffic demand. This, in turn, has led to the enhancement for LTE in Release-13 to enable Licensed-Assisted Access (LAA) operations. The design of the medium access control (MAC) protocol for the LAA system to harmonically coexist with the incumbent WLAN system operating in an unlicensed band is critical and challenging. In this paper, we consider an Integrated Access and Backhaul (IAB) system coexisting with a Wi-Fi network operating at millimeter-wave (mmWave) unlicensed spectrum, for which a listen-before-talk-based (LBT) based medium access mechanism is carefully designed. Additionally, we have considered an in-band system that supports both access and backhaul in a single node where the small-cell or the IAB nodes compete with the WiGig for medium access. We present comprehensive experimental results and give design insights based on the simulation results.
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.
This work focuses on the performance analysis of short blocklength communication with application in smart grids. We use stochastic geometry to compute in closed form the success probability of a typical message transmission as a function of its size (i.e. blocklength), the number of information bits and the density of interferers. Two different scenarios are investigated: (i) dynamic spectrum access where the licensed and unlicensed users, share the uplink channel frequency band and (ii) local licensing approach using the so called micro operator, which holds an exclusive license of its own. Approximated outage probability expression is derived for the dynamic spectrum access scenario, while a closed-form solution is attained for the micro-operator. The analysis also incorporates the use of retransmissions when messages are detected in error. Our numerical results show how reliability and delay are related in either scenarios.