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We study the performance of wireless links for a class of Poisson networks, in which packets arrive at the transmitters following Bernoulli processes. By combining stochastic geometry with queueing theory, two fundamental measures are analyzed, namely the transmission success probability and the meta distribution of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR). Different from the conventional approaches that assume independent active states across the nodes and use homogeneous point processes to model the locations of interferers, our analysis accounts for the interdependency amongst active states of the transmitters in space and arrives at a non-homogeneous point process for the modeling of interferers’ positions, which leads to a more accurate characterization of the SINR. The accuracy of the theoretical results is verified by simulations, and the developed framework is then used to devise design guidelines for the deployment strategies of wireless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the foreseeable explosive growth of small cell deployment, backhaul has become the next big challenge in the next generation wireless networks. Heterogeneous backhaul deployment using different wired and wireless technologies may be a potential solution to meet this challenge. Therefore, it is of cardinal importance to evaluate and compare the performance characteristics of various backhaul technologies to understand their effect on the network aggregate performance. In this paper, we propose relevant backhaul models and study the delay performance of various backhaul technologies with different capabilities and characteristics, including fiber, xDSL, millimeter wave (mmWave), and sub–6 GHz. Using these models, we aim at optimizing the base station (BS) association so as to minimize the mean network packet delay in a macrocell network overlaid with small cells. Numerical results are presented to show the delay performance characteristics of different backhaul solutions. Comparisons between the proposed and traditional BS association policies show the significant effect of backhaul on the network performance, which demonstrates the importance of joint system design for radio access and backhaul networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We consider the uplink transmission in multiuser wireless systems with multiple single-antenna transmitting users and a multiantenna receiver. We address two problems in this paper. The first problem is user admission, i.e., given a large number of users, how to admit the maximum number of users that can simultaneously satisfy quality of service (QoS) and power constraints. The second problem is how to distribute the data among the users when they are allowed to share data before transmission. The aim is to minimize the total data exchange cost. Such a problem is called user clustering. We formulate those problems into sparsity-maximization problems, which are NP-hard. Inspired by compressive sensing techniques, we propose a common framework to tackle those problems by first applying the \ell1 -norm relaxation and then solving them with convex optimization methods. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms achieve excellent performance. For user admission, the numbers of admitted users by the proposed algorithms are close to the optimum numbers of admitted users obtained by exhaustive search (ES) . For user clustering, the total data exchange cost is reduced by more than 10% after only a few iterations. When the QoS requirement is low, the user data exchange can be avoided using the proposed method, which achieves the optimum result obtained by ES. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As software may be used by multiple users, caching popular software at the wireless edge has been considered to save computation and communications resources for mobile edge computing (MEC). However, fetching uncached software from the core network and multicasting popular software to users have so far been ignored. Thus, existing design is incomplete and less practical. In this paper, we propose a joint caching, computation and communications mechanism which involves software fetching, caching and multicasting, as well as task input data uploading, task executing (with non-negligible time duration) and computation result downloading, and mathematically characterize it. Then, we optimize the joint caching, offloading and time allocation policy to minimize the weighted sum energy consumption subject to the caching and deadline constraints. The problem is a challenging two-timescale mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, and is NP-hard in general. We convert it into an equivalent convex MINLP problem by using some appropriate transformations and propose two low-complexity algorithms to obtain suboptimal solutions of the original non-convex MINLP problem. Specifically, the first suboptimal solution is obtained by solving a relaxed convex problem using the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and then rounding its optimal solution properly. The second suboptimal solution is proposed by obtaining a stationary point of an equivalent difference of convex (DC) problem using the penalty convex-concave procedure (Penalty-CCP) and ADMM. Finally, by numerical results, we show that the proposed solutions outperform existing schemes and reveal their advantages in efficiently utilizing storage, computation and communications resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile edge computing (MEC) is expected to provide cloud-like capacities for mobile users (MUs) at the edge of wireless networks. However, deploying MEC systems faces many challenges, one of which is to achieve an efficient distributed offloading mechanism for multiple users in time-varying wireless environments. In this paper, we study a multi-user multi-edge-node computation offloading problem. Since edge nodes’ communication and computing capacities are limited which leads resource contention when many MUs offload to the same edge node at the same time, we formulate this problem as a non-cooperative exact potential game (EPG), where each MU, in each time slot, selfishly maximizes its number of processed central processor unit (CPU) cycles and reduces its energy consumption. Assuming that channel information is static and available to MUs, we show that MUs could achieve a Nash equilibrium via a best response-based offloading mechanism. Next, we extend the problem to a practical scenario, where the number of processed CPU cycles is time-varying and unknown to MUs because of the uncertain channel information. In this case, we adopt an unknown payoff game framework and prove that the EPG properties still hold. Then, we propose a model-free reinforcement learning offloading mechanism which helps MUs learn their long-term offloading strategies to maximize their long-term utilities. Numerical results illustrate that our proposed algorithm for unknown CSI outperforms other schemes, such as local processing and random assignment, and achieves up to 87.87% average long-term payoffs compared to the perfect CSI case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider an uplink heterogeneous cloud radio access network (H-CRAN), where a macro base station (BS) coexists with many remote radio heads (RRHs). For cost savings, only the BS is connected to the baseband unit (BBU) pool via fiber links. The RRHs, however, are associated with the BBU pool through wireless fronthaul links, which share the spectrum resource with radio access networks. Due to the limited capacity of fronthaul, the compress-and-forward scheme is employed, such as point-to-point compression or Wyner–Ziv coding. Different decoding strategies are also considered. This paper aims to maximize the uplink ergodic sum-rate (SR) by jointly optimizing quantization noise matrix and bandwidth allocation between radio access networks and fronthaul links, which is a mixed time-scale issue. To reduce computational complexity and communication overhead, we introduce an approximation problem of the joint optimization problem based on large-dimensional random matrix theory, which is a slow time-scale issue, because it only depends on statistical channel information. Finally, an algorithm based on Dinkelbach’s algorithm is proposed to find the optimal solution to the approximate problem. In summary, this paper provides an economic solution to the challenge of constrained fronthaul capacity and also provides a framework with less computational complexity to study how bandwidth allocation and fronthaul compression can affect the SR maximization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By merging cloud computing into the RAN, C-RAN has been foreseen as a prospective 5G wireless systems architecture. Due to the innovative move of migrating the baseband processing functionalities to the centralized cloud baseband unit pool, C-RAN is anticipated to reduce energy consumption significantly to be a green RAN. Moreover, with the cloud-based architecture, lots of new functionalities and RAN designs are ready to be incorporated, which redefines the RAN as a flexible RAN. In this article, we review the recent advances of exploiting cloud computing to form a green and flexible C-RAN from two cloud-based properties: centralized processing and the software-defined environment. For the centralized processing property, we include coordinated multipoint and limited fronthaul capacity, multicasting, and CSI issues in C-RAN. For the software-defined environment property, we summarize elastic service scaling, functionality splitting, and functionality extension. We also include some of our recent research results and discuss several open challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The combination of artificial intelligence and mobile edge computing (MEC) is considered as a promising evolution path of the future wireless networks. As a model-level coordination learning paradigm, federated learning can make full use of the distributed computation resource in the MEC systems, which allows the users to keep their private data locally. However, due to the unreliable wireless transmission circumstances and resource constraints in the MEC systems, both the performance and training efficiency of federated learning cannot be guaranteed. To solve this problem, the optimization design of federated learning in the MEC systems is studied in this paper. First, an optimization problem is formulated to manage the tradeoff between model accuracy and training cost. Second, a joint optimization algorithm is designed to optimize the model compression, sample selection, and user selection strategies, which can approach a stationary optimal solution in a computationally efficient way. Finally, the performance of our proposed optimization scheme is evaluated by numerical simulation and experiment results, which show that both the accuracy loss and the cost of federated learning in the MEC systems can be reduced significantly by employing our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate the multiple input multiple output (MIMO)-non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission with the aid of location information. We first consider two users separated in both the distance and angle domains. With different access distances, NOMA could be used to serve the near-user and the far-user simultaneously, whereas spatial division multiple access (SDMA) would be applied if the two users have largely-separated angles of departure (AOD) that guarantees spatial orthogonality. Comparing the ergodic sum rates of these two multiple access (MA) schemes, we first characterize the preferable MA regions in the angle-distance plane. Analytical expression of the region boundary between NOMA and SDMA is derived. Moreover, NOMA-preferable regions are expressed in terms of the maximum distance difference and the minimum angle difference between the two users, respectively. On basis of these results, we further propose a location-based low-complexity user pairing algorithm for the general multiuser scenario. Numerical results confirm the accuracy of the derived region boundaries, and the simulations show that the proposed user pairing algorithm can effectively improve the resource utilization rate, compared to the conventional MA and user pairing schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long-term evolution (LTE) and wireless local area network (WLAN) are often presented as opposing technologies. Hence, efficient partitioning of the spectrum resources carries critical importance for achieving the coexistence of these on the unlicensed spectrum band. In this paper, we firstly develop an online spectrum partitioning algorithm, which needs little signal transmission and exchange between coordination manager and networks. Then, we focus on the convergence analysis of the online spectrum partitioning algorithm, which is difficult due to the time-varying wireless channels. To overcome this challenge, we model the algorithm and network dynamics as the stochastic differential equations (SDE) and show that the algorithm convergence is equivalent to the stochastic stability of a virtual stochastic dynamic system constructed by the SDEs. Then, we give the sufficient condition about the algorithm convergence and the upper bound on the tracking error of the spectrum partitioning algorithm under exogenous variations of time-varying channel state information (CSI). Based on the insights of the impact of time-varying CSI on algorithm convergence, an online compensative spectrum partitioning algorithm is developed to offset the tracking error caused by the disturbance of time-varying CSI. Through performance evaluation, we show that the coexistence performance efficiency will come at low expense of algorithm complexity and signal overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Internet of Things, wireless access networks are required to support a large number of user equipments (UEs) in real time. With UEs’ frequently arrival and departure, plenty of packet collisions can occur. Successive decoding thus becomes a promising technique to support the massive connectivity as it is capable of recovering packets from mixed received signals. In this paper, we propose an adaptive framing with successive decoding (AFSD) frame structure to deal with the fluidity of UEs. In the AFSD structure, the frame length is adaptively adjusted based on the present UE number, and successive decoding is adopted to alleviate the packet loss caused by packet collision. To quantify its performance, we provide exact as well as asymptotic results for the average delay. The analytical results are validated by simulations, and further extended to practical systems with estimated UE number, which shows that knowledge of active UE number is useful for delay reduction. Optimizations on UE transmission probability and frame length are also presented. In particular, the numerical studies reveal that by using optimized parameters, the average delay is reduced significantly for a wide range of arrival rates, which validates the effectiveness of the AFSD structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Capacity of energy harvesting communications with deterministic energy arrival and finite battery size is investigated. An abstraction of the physical layer is considered, where binary sequences are transmitted through a binary symmetric channel, and a cost function is associated with the transmission of each symbol. Upper and lower bounds on the channel capacity are derived for the general case by studying the normalized exponent of the cardinality of the set of feasible input sequences. Several upper bounds on the exponent are proposed by studying supersets of the feasible set. Lower bounds are derived by applying the binary entropy-power inequality and by using specific signaling schemes based on a save-and-transmit strategy. Numerical results are presented for several values of the energy arrival rate and battery size, validating the usefulness of the capacity bounds established for the energy harvesting channels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]