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Being an effective non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technique, sparse code multiple access (SCMA) is promising for future wireless communication. Compared with orthogonal techniques, SCMA enjoys higher overloading tolerance and lower complexity because of its sparsity. In this paper, based on deterministic message passing algorithm (DMPA), algorithmic simplifications such as domain changing and probability approximation are applied for SCMA decoding. Early termination, adaptive decoding, and initial noise reduction are also employed for faster convergence and better performance. Numerical results show that the proposed optimizations benefit both decoding complexity and speed. Furthermore, efficient hardware architectures based on folding and retiming are proposed. VLSI implementation is also given in this paper. Comparison with the state-of-the-art have shown the proposed decoder's advantages in both latency and throughput (multi-Gbps). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hardware non-idealities are among the main performance restrictions for upcoming wireless communication systems. Asymmetric hardware distortions (HWD) happen when the impairments of the I/Q branches are correlated or imbalanced, which in turn generate improper additive interference at the receiver side. When the interference is improper, as well as in other interference-limited scenarios, improper Gaussian signaling (IGS) has been shown to provide rate and/or power efficiency benefits. In this paper, we investigate the rate benefits of IGS in a two-user interference channel (IC) with additive asymmetric HWD when interference is treated as noise. We propose two iterative algorithms to optimize the parameters of the improper transmit signals. We first rewrite the rate region as an pseudo-signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (PSINR) region and employ majorization minimization and fractional programming to find a suboptimal solution for the achievable user rates. Then, we propose a simplified algorithm based on a separate optimization of the powers and complementary variances of the users, which exhibits lower computational complexity. We show that IGS can improve the performance of the two-user IC with additive HWD. Our proposed algorithms outperform proper Gaussian signaling and competing IGS algorithms in the literature that do not consider asymmetric HWD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunistic routing has been extensively studied and utilized in delay/disruption-tolerant networks. The extensive use of nodes' local information, e.g., the distance to the destination or the contact frequency with the destination, in such routing schemes can cause severe security and privacy problems. Existing solutions of anonymous routing can introduce undesired overhead and fail to provide the confidentiality of the routing metric. In this paper, we propose an advanced framework for opportunistic routing schemes, providing the following properties: confidentiality of the nodes' routing metric, anonymous authentication, and efficient key agreement for pairwise communication. A comprehensive evaluation, including security analysis, efficiency analysis, and simulation evaluation, is presented to show the security and feasibility of the proposed framework. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Visible light communication (VLC) is seen as a supplement for fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication in short-range high data rate communication applications. A reliable VLC system relies on an accurate estimate of the position and orientation of the receiver, which corresponds to the six-dimensional positioning problem mentioned in. In this paper, we investigate the simultaneous position and orientation estimation (SPO) problem using received signal strength (RSS), for a visible light system containing multiple LEDs and multiple photodiodes (PDs) (MLMP). Although in general, the position and orientation of the receiver can be represented by a vector and a rotation matrix, respectively, the constraints imposed by the rotation matrix make the numerical optimization in the estimation process cumbersome, e.g, the commonly used constrained optimization method is often very complex and non-robust. Therefore, in this paper, we design two SPO algorithms using the principle of optimization on manifolds, which alleviates the constraints from the rotation matrix. In addition, we propose an initialization algorithm, based on the direct linear transformation (DLT) principle, to obtain an initial estimate in closed-form for the iterative algorithms. To evaluate the performance of the proposed RSS-based SPO algorithms, we derive the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB). In particular, the orientation error component of the CRB corresponds to the intrinsic CRB or the CRB on manifolds, which measures the error in the estimated rotation matrix in a physically meaningful way. Finally, computer simulations show an asymptotic tightness between the performance of the proposed algorithms and the theoretical lower bound, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The C-RAN architecture has been prevailing in mobile networks for 5G and beyond. Along with the significant increase in the amount of mobile data, network operators must consider the spatio-temporal pattern of traffi c demand due to human mobility and lifestyles. It has been an important problem to efficiently deploy mobile networks avoiding the underutilization of cell capacities in off -peak times. To address this problem, in this paper we propose a concept of an adaptive C-RAN architecture toward the beyond 5G era. The proposed architecture enables flexible reconfi guration of the radio unit (RU) states and movable DU locations considering the changes in demand distribution. The DUs and RUs compose wireless relay fronthaul networks to forward fronthaul streams satisfying the strict latency requirements. This paper also proposes the joint scheduling algorithm to activate RUs, relocate DUs, and determine forwarding paths of fronthaul streams. It was confi rmed with computer simulations that mobile networks can be efficiently reconstructed with the proposed idea by activating/deactivating RUs and relocating/ migrating DUs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dynamic network architectures (DNAs) have been developed under the assumption that some terminals can be converted into temporary access points (APs) anytime when connected to the Internet. In this paper, we consider the problem of assigning a group of users to a set of potential APs with the aim to maximize the downlink system throughput of DNA networks, subject to total transmit power and users’ quality of service (QoS) constraints. In our first method, we relax the integer optimization variables to be continuous. The resulting non-convex continuous optimization problem is solved using successive convex approximation framework to arrive at a sequence of second-order cone programs (SOCPs). In the next method, the selection process is viewed as finding a sparsity constrained solution to our problem of sum rate maximization. It is demonstrated in numerical results that while the first approach has better data rates for dense networks, the sparsity oriented method has a superior speed of convergence. Moreover, for the scenarios considered, in addition to comprehensively outperforming some well-known approaches, our algorithms yield data rates close to those obtained by branch and bound method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a technique capable to ameliorating the impairment caused by radio channel multipath, in the estimation of the wireless communications direction of arrival (DoA). This feature is enabled by a space division multiple access approach supported by a DoA technique based on the combination of the estimates achieved at both 2.45 and 5.2 GHz. The DoA estimation relies on a comparison between the real-time received signal strength indicator and the predicted signal level distribution, which can be estimated and stored without the need of lengthy offline measurement. The experimental setup adopted for the technique validation involves an active interferer, by which arbitrary multipath levels can be implemented. An equivalent reflection coefficient signal-to-interference ratio is defined as the ratio of the unperturbed signal and the induced coherent isofrequency interferer signal, compatible with the two-ray model of the multipath impairment. The proposed technique exploits a dual-band frequency planning, and because of the combined use of the data at the two frequencies, a mean error of 2.6° is observed within a domain ranging from 0.5 to 4 m, for the entire 360° angle in the reference anechoic scenario. The 90th percentile of the cumulative error distribution is 5.4°. In the presence of a strong coherent interferer, compatible with a total reflection from the walls, the mean error is 4.9°, while the 90th percentile of the cumulative error distribution is 10.5°. In the presence of the strongest coherent interferer signal available, which is more severe than the worst case of total reflection, the mean error is 7.1°, while the 90th percentile of the cumulative error distribution is 15.1°. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The papers in this special section are focused on one aspect of the current technological wave. As we all know, nature-inspired (NI) computing and algorithms play an ever increasing role in problem solving by way of optimization, machine intelligence, data mining, and resource management. Nature has evolved over millions of years under a variety of harsh and severe environments and, thus, provides a rich source of inspiration for designing algorithms and approaches to tackle real-world challenging EMC and Signal & Power Integrity (SI/PI) problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a scheme for constructing an Internet Protocol (IP) version 6 over low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPAN) wireless sensor network based on a cluster tree. In the cluster generation algorithm, a cluster tree is always an isolated node with the maximum number of neighbor isolated nodes that launches the cluster generation process; therefore, the total number of cluster heads is minimized. In the cluster-tree construction algorithm, the cluster-tree architecture is proposed, and the cluster-tree construction algorithm minimizes the total number of nodes included in a cluster tree; therefore, the routing cost is reduced. In the cluster-tree repair algorithm, when a cluster head or a cluster associate node fails or moves, a new cluster head or cluster associate node is elected to maintain the cluster-tree topology. This paper compares the performance parameters of Least Cluster Change algorithm with Lowest-ID, Root-based Lowest-ID cluster constructing mechanism, and the proposed scheme, including the cluster-tree topology stability, the routing memory cost, and the routing update cost. The analytical data show that the performance of the proposed scheme is better. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last several years, many algorithms trying to mimic biological processes have been proposed to enhance the performance of communication networks. However, the bio-inspired algorithms represent only the very first step toward the design of a smart adaptive communication network since: 1) they model only a limited set of the rules underlying the biological processes, thus, omitting fundamental functionalities; 2) they are executed on traditional computer architectures, thus, failing to achieve the intrinsic parallelism exhibited by biological processes. To overcome these issues, in this paper, the BioNetwork paradigm is proposed, a novel communication network paradigm in which the traditional network nodes are replaced by living organisms. The BioNetwork paradigm provides very attractive features over traditional network paradigms, such as efficiency, adaptivity, reliability, self-organization, and scalability. Moreover, it has a huge potential since it can be adopted in many different applications, such as health and military ones. In the paper, this potential is shown by proving that a BioNetwork can solve one of the most fundamental NP-hard problems in networks, i.e., the Steiner tree problem. To this aim, a BioNetwork constituted by a unicellular organism, the Physarum polycephalum slime mold, is designed. Throughout the paper, it is proven that a Physarum BioNetwork can solve the Steiner tree problem with an exponential convergence rate toward the optimal solution. The theoretical solutions are validated through a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the current architecture of dynamic spectrum access, secondary users (SUs) only opportunistically access the spectrum of primary users (PUs). The resurgence of PUs disrupts secondary communications, which can result in poor performance for SUs. In this paper, we propose a novel architecture for dynamic spectrum access, termed dynamic spectrum co-access (DSCA), to enable the PU and the SU to simultaneously access the licensed spectrum. With DSCA, SUs transparently incentivize PUs through increasing the PU performance so that SUs can access the spectrum simultaneously with PUs; hence, there is no disruption to secondary communications due to the resurgence of PUs. We derive a mathematical model to formulate the minimum incentives for the spectrum co-access between the PU and the SU and to compute the region of co-access to determine the SUs that can co-access with a given PU. An algorithm is also developed to select the co-access primary and secondary links to maximize network performance. Numerical results indicate that DSCA significantly improves performance compared with the current architecture of dynamic spectrum access. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on scheduling in multihop wireless networks where flows are associated with fixed routes. The well-known back-pressure scheduling algorithm is throughput-optimal, but requires constant exchange of queue length information among neighboring nodes for calculating the “back-pressure.” Moreover, previous research shows that the total queue length along a route increases quadratically as the route length under the back-pressure algorithm, resulting in poor delay performance. In this paper, we propose a self-regulated MaxWeight scheduling, which does not require back-pressure calculation. We prove that the self-regulated MaxWeight scheduling is throughput-optimal (an algorithm is said to be throughput-optimal if it can stabilize any traffic that can be stabilized by any other algorithm). In the simulation part, we show that the self-regulated MaxWeight scheduling has a much better delay performance than the back-pressure algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) technology can efficiently use the spectrum to increase the communication throughput. Designing low-complexity detection algorithms with high performance for the MIMO system has been an important issue. In this paper, we propose efficient detection algorithms for MIMO systems based on differential metrics. We first define differential metrics and give their recursive calculation of different orders. Based on differential metrics, we give the principle of gradient search. We then propose a gradient search algorithm (GSA) that can provide a tradeoff between performance and complexity. The GSA applies the indicative functions such that we can determine in advance some maximum-likelihood (ML) bits of the initial sequence and reduce the searching range. The GSA also uses a stop condition with which we can stop the search if the proper condition is satisfied. The GSA does not need QR decomposition (QRD) or matrix inversion. The multiplicative operations are only necessary before the searching process, during which only the additive operations are needed. For large-scaled MIMO systems, we also give a simple searching algorithm based on differential metrics. Finally, we propose a fixed-complexity gradient algorithm (FCGA), which has a fixed number of operations during the searching process and is appropriate for pipelined hardware implementation. The simulation results validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

To efficiently trade off system sum rate and link fairness, power allocation in wireless spectrum-sharing networks often concentrates upon proportional fairness. The corresponding problem has been proved to be convex for a single tone but NP-hard for more than two tones. However, in the two-tone case, the complexity of the problem for achieving proportional fairness has not been addressed yet. In this paper, we prove that the issue of proportional-fairness optimization for the two-tone situation is NP-hard by reducing the problem of finding the maximum independent set in an undirected graph to it. Moreover, a computationally efficient algorithm is proposed to provide an efficient suboptimal solution. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of our proposal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we study the distributed precoding problem for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) in decode-and-forward (DF)-based multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) relay networks. The system model considered here consists of a source, a relay, an information decoding (ID) receiver, and an energy harvesting (EH) receiver, all mounted with multiple antennas. Since full channel state information (CSI) is usually unavailable, a practical scenario, where only local CSI is required, is considered in this paper. Such a practical scenario naturally constitutes a noncooperative game, where the source and the relay can be regarded as two rational game players. With properly designed utilities, it can be further shown that the existence and uniqueness of the pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) of the proposed game can both be guaranteed under some mild conditions. Therefore, a distributed iterative precoding algorithm can be developed based on the best-response dynamic to obtain the unique NE solution for the proposed game. Moreover, a proximal-point-based regularization approach is also pursued to ensure the convergence of the proposed algorithm without requiring special restrictions on the channel ranks. Numerical simulations are also provided to demonstrate the proposed algorithm. Results show that our algorithm can converge quickly to a satisfactory solution with guaranteed convergence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers optimal joint time, frequency, and power allocation for energy-efficient device-to-device (D2D) communications in an overlay cellular network, where multiple D2D transmitters communicate with their corresponding D2D receivers while utilizing the energy harvested from a cellular base station (BS). Due to channel estimation error and feedback delays, the channel state information (CSI) available at the transmitters is usually imperfect, which can significantly deteriorate the energy efficiency (EE) of the considered system. To mitigate the impact of imperfect CSI, we formulate a non-convex robust optimization problem for the maximization of the EE (in bits/Joule) of the system while ensuring quality of service (QoS) requirements on the minimum data rata and the minimum amount of harvested energy for cellular and D2D users, respectively. We reveal that the optimal energy-efficient D2D transmission should exhaust all the harvested energy of each D2D transmitter. Exploiting this fact, we propose an efficient iterative algorithm for obtaining the optimal solution. To strike a balance between performance and computational complexity, we further propose a low-complexity suboptimal algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with several baseline schemes, both the proposed optimal and suboptimal algorithms can significantly improve the EE of wireless-powered D2D communications under imperfect CSI. Moreover, the proposed suboptimal algorithm is close-to-optimal when the number of cellular users are small or the channel estimation error is large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the beam synthesis and management methods for the phased antenna array-based wireless communications systems, e.g., 5 G mmWave communications. First, we propose a novel on-off beam synthesis method that can synthesize any given on-off beam pattern. The proposed method maximizes the beam power towards a given set of on-directions while suppressing the power towards all off-directions. Second, by using a set of beams synthesized by the proposed on-off beam synthesis method, we design a non-interactive hierarchical beam management algorithm that can greatly reduce the radio resource usage, feedback overhead, and the latency of the beam discovery, compared to the exhaustive beam search algorithms. Since the proposed beam management algorithm is non-interactive, it can be applied to the initial access as well as the beam tracking, and is especially useful for supporting a massive number of devices. Finally, we show the validness of the proposed beam synthesis and management methods by conducting experiments on a phased antenna array experimental testbed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new paradigm to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency for future wireless networks by reconfiguring the wireless signal propagation via passive reflection. To reap the promising gains of IRS, channel state information (CSI) is essential, whereas channel estimation errors are inevitable in practice due to limited channel training resources. In this paper, in order to optimize the performance of IRS-aided multiuser communications with imperfect CSI, we propose to jointly design the active transmit precoding at the access point (AP) and passive reflection coefficients of the IRS, each consisting of not only the conventional phase shift and also the newly exploited amplitude variation. First, the achievable rate of each user is derived assuming a practical IRS channel estimation method, which shows that the interference due to CSI errors is intricately related to the AP transmit precoders, the channel training power and the IRS reflection coefficients during both channel training and data transmission. Next, for the single-user case, by combining the benefits of the penalty method, Dinkelbach method and block successive upper-bound minimization (BSUM) method, a new penalized Dinkelbach-BSUM algorithm is proposed to optimize the IRS reflection coefficients for maximizing the achievable data transmission rate subjected to CSI errors; while for the multiuser case, a new penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based algorithm is proposed to maximize the users’ weighted sum-rate. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms as compared to benchmark schemes. In particular, useful insights are drawn to characterize the effect of IRS reflection amplitude control (with/without the conventional phase-shift control) on the system performance under imperfect CSI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) have been recently considered as an energy-efficient solution for future wireless networks due to their fast and low-power configuration, which has increased potential in enabling massive connectivity and low-latency communications. Accurate and low-overhead channel estimation in RIS-based systems is one of the most critical challenges due to the usually large number of RIS unit elements and their distinctive hardware constraints. In this paper, we focus on the uplink of a RIS-empowered multi-user Multiple Input Single Output (MISO) uplink communication systems and propose a channel estimation framework based on the parallel factor decomposition to unfold the resulting cascaded channel model. We present two iterative estimation algorithms for the channels between the base station and RIS, as well as the channels between RIS and users. One is based on alternating least squares (ALS), while the other uses vector approximate message passing to iteratively reconstruct two unknown channels from the estimated vectors. To theoretically assess the performance of the ALS-based algorithm, we derived its estimation Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB). We also discuss the downlink achievable sum rate computation with estimated channels and different precoding schemes for the base station. Our extensive simulation results show that our algorithms outperform benchmark schemes and that the ALS technique achieves the CRB. It is also demonstrated that the sum rate using the estimated channels always reach that of perfect channels under various settings, thus, verifying the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed estimation algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The broadcast nature of wireless communications makes transmission susceptible to eavesdropping. Recently, physical-layer security has been extensively studied to secure the wireless transmissions, but the security is severely compromised when the eavesdropper has the superiority in the channel quality. Toward this issue, we in this paper propose a joint ARQ and network coding method exploiting the characteristics of both the physical layer and the link layer. Specifically, we relate the message to be transmitted in the current slot with the successfully decoded messages in previous slots, where the ARQ is employed at the legitimate side to guarantee the successful transmission and decoding. Once one or more received messages fail to be decoded at the eavesdropper, it further prevents the eavesdropper from decoding the transmissions in later slots and thus the message transmitted currently and later is secured at the legitimate side. Moreover, for the more disadvantageous case that the eavesdropper is geographically closer to the transmitter, we further propose a destination-aided network coding scheme, which secures private information no matter where the eavesdropper is. The closed-form expressions of intercept probability and loss probability of the private information are analytically presented. The simulation results are provided to confirm our theoretical findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problem of scheduling real-time traffic in wireless networks. We consider ad hoc wireless networks with general conflict graph-based interference model and single-hop traffic. Each packet is associated with a deadline and will be dropped if it is not transmitted before the deadline. The number of packet arrivals in each time-slot and the maximum delay before the deadline are independent and identically distributed across time. We require a minimum fraction of packets to be delivered. At each link, we assume the link keeps track of the difference between the minimum number of packets that need to be delivered so far and the number of packets that are actually delivered, which we call the deficit. The largest-deficit-first (LDF) policy schedules links in descending order according to their deficit values, which is a variation of the longest-queue-first (LQF) policy for non-real-time traffic. We prove that the efficiency ratio of LDF, which is the fraction of the throughput region that LDF can achieve for given traffic distributions, can be lower-bounded by a quantity that we call the real-time local-pooling factor (R-LPF). We further prove that a lower bound on the R-LPF can be related to the weighted sum of the service rates, with a special case of 1/(\beta+1) by considering the uniform weight, where \beta is the interference degree of the conflict graph. We also propose a heuristic consensus algorithm that can be used to obtain a good weight vector for such lower bounds for given network topology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wireless network communication has developed rapidly in recent years, especially in the field of Internet of vehicles (IoV). However, due to the limitations of traditional network architecture, resource scheduling in wireless network environment is still facing great challenges. We focus on the urgent need of users for bandwidth resources in the IoV scenario under virtual network environment. This paper proposes a bandwidth aware multi domain virtual network embedding (BA-VNE) algorithm. The algorithm is mainly aimed at the problem that users need a lot of bandwidth in wireless communication mode, and solves the problem of bandwidth resource allocation from the perspective of virtual network embedding (VNE). In order to improve the performance of the algorithm, we introduce particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to optimize the performance of the algorithm. In order to verify the effectiveness of the algorithm, we have carried out simulation experiments from link bandwidth, mapping cost and virtual network request (VNR) acceptance rate. The final results show that the proposed algorithm is better than other representative algorithms in the above indicators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a cross-layer optimization framework for the wireless sensor networks. In a wireless sensor network, each sensor makes a local observation of the underlying physical phenomenon and sends a quantized version of the observation to a central location via wireless links. As the sensor observations are often partial and correlated, the network performance is a complicated and nonseparable function of individual data rates at each sensor. In addition, due to the shared nature of wireless medium, nearby transmissions often interfere with each other. Thus, the traditional "bit-pipe" model for network link capacity no longer holds. This paper deals with the joint optimization of source quantization, routing, and power control in a wireless sensor network. We follow a separate source and channel coding approach and show that the overall network optimization problem can be naturally decomposed into a source coding subproblem at the application layer and a wireless power control subproblem at the physical layer. The interfaces between the layers are precisely the dual optimization variables. In addition, we introduce a novel source coding model at the application layer, which allows the efficient design of practical source quantization schemes at each sensor. Finally, we propose a dual algorithm for the overall network optimization problem. The dual algorithm, when combined with a column-generation method, allows an efficient solution for the overall network optimization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the asymptotic performance of a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multiple-access (MA) wireless network where spatial correlations at both the transmitters (i.e., mobile stations) and the central receiver (i.e., base station) exist, and more than one multiantenna sets are employed at the receiver to provide macrodiversity. The sense of asymptotic behavior we consider is the large-system limit in which the numbers of antennas at each mobile station and antenna set go to infinity with their ratios fixed. Using the replica method, we derive analytical solutions to the asymptotic spectral efficiency (SE) of the MIMO-MA systems for any given input distributions (not necessarily Gaussian) from the mobile transmitters. Our results can be regarded as the generalization of many previously known results for degenerate cases. Another contribution of this paper is an efficient algorithm to determine the asymptotic optimum transmit-signal covariance matrices that can maximize the SE of the MIMO-MA network within the period in which the spatial channel covariance information (CCI) can be considered static, and assuming that only CCI is available at the transmitters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 802.11ac is a significant landmark in wireless communications, as it pushes towards new rate limits by utilizing downlink multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) beamforming to transmit data to various locations simultaneously. However, successful beamforming relies on intelligent user selection which requires, in turn, extensive overhead of channel calibration between the AP and each of the candidate users. The large overhead involved in the user selection procedure overwhelms the multiuser gain and hinders the utilization of multiuser MIMO. The phenomenon is even more acute when APs handle large groups of mobile users, which frequently associate and disconnect, making the process of acquiring channel state from all users and selecting the appropriate group even harder. Thus, the subtle relation between the achievable rate of a scheduling algorithm and the overhead it requires is significant for the 802.11ac performance analysis. In this paper, we provide a rigorous analysis of distributed algorithms that schedule a group of users for the downlink. In particular, we accommodate common scheduling methods for the 802.11ac protocol and analyze both their achievable rate and their calibration process overhead. Both analysis and extensive simulations depict the superiority of simple threshold-based methods in terms of the throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a framework for random access that is based on three elements: physical-layer network coding (PLNC), signature codes, and tree splitting. In presence of a collision, physical-layer network coding enables the receiver to decode, i.e., compute, the sum of the packets that were transmitted by the individual users. For each user, the packet consists of the user’s signature, as well as the data that the user wants to communicate. As long as no more than $K$ users collide, their identities can be recovered from the sum of their signatures. This framework for creating and transmitting packets can be used as a fundamental building block in random access algorithms, since it helps to deal efficiently with the uncertainty of the set of contending terminals. In this paper, we show how to apply the framework in conjunction with a tree-splitting algorithm, which is required to deal with the case that more than $K$ users collide. We demonstrate that our approach achieves throughput that tends to 1 rapidly as $K$ increases. We also present results on net data-rate of the system, showing the impact of the overheads of the constituent elements of the proposed protocol. We compare the performance of our scheme with an upper bound that is obtained under the assumption that the active users are a priori known. Also, we consider an upper bound on the net data-rate for any PLNC-based strategy in which one linear equation per slot is decoded. We show that already at modest packet lengths, the net data-rate of our scheme becomes close to the second upper bound, i.e., the overhead of the contention resolution algorithm and the signature codes vanishes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we design a robust resource allocation algorithm for a wireless-powered communication network (WPCN) taking into account residual hardware impairments (HWIs) at the transceivers, the imperfectness of the channel state information, and the non-linearity of practical radio frequency energy harvesting circuits. In order to ensure power-efficient secure communication, physical layer security techniques are exploited to deliberately degrade the channel quality of a multiple-antenna eavesdropper. The resource allocation algorithm design is formulated as a non-convex optimization problem for minimization of the total power consumption in the network, while guaranteeing the quality of service of the information receivers in terms of secrecy rate. The globally optimal solution of the optimization problem is obtained via a 2-D search and semidefinite programming relaxation. To strike a balance between computational complexity and system performance, a low-complexity iterative suboptimal resource allocation algorithm is also proposed. Numerical results demonstrate that both the proposed optimal and suboptimal schemes can significantly reduce the total system power consumption required for guaranteeing secure communication, and unveil the impact of HWIs on the system performance: 1) residual HWIs create a system performance bottleneck in WPCN in the high transmit/receive power regimes; 2) increasing the number of transmit antennas can effectively reduce the power consumption of wireless power transfer and alleviate the performance degradation due to residual HWIs; and 3) imperfect CSI exacerbates the impact of residual HWIs, which increases the power consumption of both wireless power and wireless information transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Generalized frequency division multiplexing (GFDM) is one of the new waveforms with several attractive features such as lower out of band radiation, higher spectral efficiency, and better immunity to carrier frequency offset errors as compared with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. However, it requires receivers with high computational complexity. Among different linear receiver structures, the joint minimum mean square error (joint-MMSE) receiver for GFDM achieves the best bit-error-rate (BER) performance, but it is the most computationally complex linear receiver. In this paper, we present a novel low complexity joint-MMSE receiver. We derive the closed-form expression for the joint-MMSE receiver filter by harnessing circulant properties of the matrices involved in the demodulation process. Amidst different operations involved in the receiver processing, inversion of a positive definite circulant-plus-diagonal matrix is found to be the costliest. Two low-complexity algorithms for the inversion of a positive definite circulant-plus-diagonal matrix are developed to design the low complexity receiver. We also propose a low complexity bias correction to improve BER performance. Our proposed receiver achieves a log-linear order of complexity without any noticeable loss in BER performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents low-cost compressors for video display systems, which compress video data to reduce the size of the frame memory in a display panel in a television or a smartphone. The hardware solution exploits the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and 1-D set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) to support the raster-scan processing order in a display system and meet the fixed target compression ratio (CR). However, the compression efficiency and hardware cost often increase in proportion to the block size and thus, designing a compressor with low cost but high fidelity is challenging. This paper proposes a generic partitioned SPIHT algorithm, which achieves a low-cost design for mobile devices by allowing various sizes of partitioned sub-blocks. By taking advantage of DWT decomposition properties, the proposed algorithm partitions a coding block into sub-blocks, each of which can be processed independently. The independent coding operations among multiple sub-blocks allow the size of the hardware buffer to be decreased, by storing the temporary results only for an individual sub-block. However, the proposed sub-block coding slightly decreases the compression efficiency when each sub-block is compressed with the same target CR. To reduce the drop-off in the compression efficiency, the boundary-pixel handling in DWT is exploited and the proposed partitioned SPIHT method adjusts the target CR for each sub-block depending on the potential quality loss. When compared with the previous 1-D design, experimental results show that the hardware gate count and internal memory are reduced by 59.34% and 75%, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed boundary handling and bit-allocation schemes mitigate the PSNR degradation due to the sub-block coding by 1.11 dB. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Location-aware wireless networks can provide precise location information in harsh environments, however, which is only possible when all nodes are well-functioning. In this paper, we propose algorithms and analyze the performance limits for both non-cooperative and cooperative localization networks in the presence of ranging outliers. Especially, we show that the localization performance can be boosted by using the cooperative outlier detection scheme. An algorithm based on expectation-maximization is proposed for non-cooperative localization networks, while a variational message passing-based algorithm is proposed for the cooperative counterparts. Performance limits are investigated using Cramér–Rao lower bound. Further inspection on the performance limits confirms the performance gain from the cooperative detection scheme. Stochastic geometric analysis is also carried out to account for the stochastic nature of wireless networks, as well as to provide simpler expressions and additional insights. Simulation results corroborate the analytical results, and show that both of the proposed algorithms are capable of attaining the corresponding performance limits at a significantly reduced computational cost compared with existing algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Terahertz (THz) band communication is envisioned as a key technology to satisfy the increasing demand for ultrabroadband wireless systems, thanks to its ultrabroad bandwidth. Tailored for the unique properties of pulse-based communications in the THz band, two timing acquisition algorithms are proposed and analyzed thoroughly in this paper. First, a low-sampling-rate (LSR) synchronization algorithm is proposed, by extending the theory of sampling signals with finite rate of innovation in the communication context and exploiting the properties of the annihilating filter. The simulation results show that the timing accuracy at an order of ten picoseconds is achievable. In particular, the LSR algorithm has high performance with uniform sampling at $1/20$ of the Nyquist rate when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is high (i.e., greater than 18 dB). Complementary to this, a maximum likelihood (ML) approach for timing acquisition is developed, which searches for the timing offsets by adopting a two-step acquisition procedure based on the ML criterion. The simulation results show that the ML-based algorithm is well suitable in the low SNR case with a half-reduced search space. For further evaluation, the error performance and the resulting bit-error-rate sensitivity to the timing errors in the LSR and the ML algorithms are both analytically and numerically studied. This paper provides very different and promising angles to efficiently and reliably solve the timing acquisition problem for pulse-based THz band wireless systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to signal fading and user mobility in wireless networks, quality-of-service provisioning for wireless services has become more challenging. As a promising technique, cooperative communications make use of the broadcasting nature of the wireless medium to facilitate data transmission and, thereby, reduce energy consumption. However, in many studies on wireless cooperative diversity, it is often assumed that the number of relays or the relay distribution intensity is known a priori. In this paper, we relax this assumption and propose an algorithm to estimate the relay intensity for a backoff-based cooperative scheme, where the relays are distributed as a homogeneous Poisson point process. It is proved that the algorithm can converge to an optimal solution with the minimum estimation error. Based on the estimated relay intensity, we further investigate a distributed energy saving strategy, which selectively turns off some relays to reduce energy consumption while maintaining the required transmission success probability. The performance of the proposed cooperative scheme is analytically evaluated with respect to the collision probability. The numerical and simulation results demonstrate the high accuracy and efficiency of the intensity estimation algorithm and validate the theoretical analysis. Moreover, the proposed cooperative scheme exhibits significant energy savings and satisfactory transmission performance, which offers a good match to accommodate green communications in wireless networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we investigate the problem of distributed channel selection for interference mitigation in a canonical communication network. The channel is assumed time-varying, and the active user set is considered dynamically variable due to the specific service requirement. This problem is formulated as an exact potential game, and the optimality property of the solution to this problem is first analyzed. Then, we design a low-complexity fully distributed no-regret learning algorithm for channel adaptation in a dynamic environment, where each active player can independently and automatically update its action with no information exchange. The proposed algorithm is proven to converge to a set of correlated equilibria with a probability of 1. Finally, we conduct simulations to demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal performance for interference mitigation in dynamic environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), benefited from the breakthrough on the fabrication of programmable meta-material, has been speculated as one of the key enabling technologies for the future six generation (6G) wireless communication systems scaled up beyond massive multiple input multiple output (Massive-MIMO) technology to achieve smart radio environments. Employed as reflecting arrays, RIS is able to assist MIMO transmissions without the need of radio frequency chains resulting in considerable reduction in power consumption. In this paper, we investigate the joint design of transmit beamforming matrix at the base station and the phase shift matrix at the RIS, by leveraging recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We first develop a DRL based algorithm, in which the joint design is obtained through trial-and-error interactions with the environment by observing predefined rewards, in the context of continuous state and action. Unlike the most reported works utilizing the alternating optimization techniques to alternatively obtain the transmit beamforming and phase shifts, the proposed DRL based algorithm obtains the joint design simultaneously as the output of the DRL neural network. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is not only able to learn from the environment and gradually improve its behavior, but also obtains the comparable performance compared with two state-of-the-art benchmarks. It is also observed that, appropriate neural network parameter settings will improve significantly the performance and convergence rate of the proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the information-energy ($\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$) region for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) networks in mobility scenarios, where a moving transmitter simultaneously transmits information and power to a fixed receiver, and the receiver adopts power splitting (PS) receiving architecture. In order to characterize the tradeoff between the received information and harvested energy, the $\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$ region is defined, and corresponding optimization problems are formulated to explore the system $\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$ regions by jointly optimizing the transmit power at the transmitter and the PS ratio at the receiver with three popular energy harvesting (EH) models, i.e., traditional linear EH model, the logistic nonlinear EH model and the piecewise nonlinear EH model. Particularly, to efficiently solve the nonconvex optimization problem with the logistic nonlinear EH model, a successive convex approximate (SCA)-based algorithm is proposed, which is able to characterize the lower bound of the $\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$ with low complexity. To solve the optimization problems with the linear and piecewise EH models, as they are convex, some closed and semi-closed solutions are derived by using Lagrange dual method and KKT conditions. Numerical results show that compared with the $\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$ regions under the linear and piecewise EH models, that under the logistic nonlinear EH model is smaller due to the limitations of practical EH circuit features. Moreover, with a fixed moving speed, when the transmit power is relatively large, the logistic nonlinear EH model can be replaced with the piecewise one due to the relatively small gap between their achieved $\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$ regions. Additionally, for a fixed moving track length, the higher moving speed yields the smaller $\mathrm{I}$ - $\mathrm{E}$ region with all three EH models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new technology for achieving both spectrum and energy efficient wireless communication systems in the future. However, existing works on IRS mainly consider frequency-flat channels and assume perfect knowledge of channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. Motivated by the above, in this paper we study an IRS-enhanced orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system under frequency-selective channels and propose a practical transmission protocol with channel estimation. First, to reduce the overhead in channel training as well as exploit the channel spatial correlation, we propose a novel IRS elements grouping method, where each group consists of a set of adjacent IRS elements that share a common reflection coefficient. Based on this method, we propose a practical transmission protocol where only the combined channel of each group needs to be estimated, thus substantially reducing the training overhead. Next, with any given grouping and estimated CSI, we formulate the problem to maximize the achievable rate by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation and the IRS passive array reflection coefficients. Although the formulated problem is non-convex and thus difficult to solve, we propose an efficient algorithm to obtain a high-quality suboptimal solution for it, by alternately optimizing the power allocation and the passive array coefficients in an iterative manner, along with a customized method for the initialization. Simulation results show that the proposed design significantly improves the OFDM link rate performance as compared to the case without using IRS. Moreover, it is shown that there exists an optimal size for IRS elements grouping which achieves the maximum achievable rate due to the practical trade-off between the training overhead and IRS passive beamforming flexibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunistic beamforming (OBF) is an attractive research topic in wireless communications, which can provide multi-user diversity with a low complexity. The conventional OBF technique requires a large number of waiting users, and cannot simultaneously support multiple users. In order to solve the mentioned problem, this paper proposes a downlink multi-user multi-weight opportunistic beamforming non-orthogonal multiple access (MW-OBF-NOMA) system. An objective function is formulated to maximize the sum spectrum efficiency (SE) of the proposed system, however, it is a non-convex issue and intractable to derive an optimal solution. To solve this non-convex issue, we divide it into two sub-optimal issues and solve them one-by-one. Based on the solutions of the two sub-optimal issues, a joint iterative resource allocation algorithm is presented. Moreover, we discuss the influences of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) estimation, and deduce a closed-form expression of bit error ratio (BER). Numerical results show that our proposed system can simultaneously serve multiple users without extra resources, and achieve an improved sum SE with a low complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem for downlink multicarrier non-orthogonal multiple access systems with short-packet communications (MC-NOMA-SPC). In contrast to long-packet communications in conventional wireless systems, SPC suffers from a transmission rate degradation and an unavoidable decoding error rate. Thus conventional resource allocation based on the Shannon capacity assuming infinite blocklength is no longer optimal. In this paper, we propose to use the effective-throughput as the performance metric to evaluate the tradeoff between the transmission rate and the decoding error rate. Building on that, we jointly optimize the subcarrier assignment, transmission power allocation, and transmission rate adaptation of each user to maximize the total weighted effective-throughput subject to transmission reliability and various practical constraints. Since the formulated problem belongs to a non-convex mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, we develop an efficient algorithm based on the dynamic programming (DP) recursion framework to obtain its optimal solutions. We further propose a low-complexity algorithm based on the principles of block coordinate descent (BCD) and concave-convex procedure (CCCP). Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed low-complexity algorithm can achieve similar performance as that of the optimal solution and outperform the other baseline schemes significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Edge federated learning (FL) is an emerging paradigm that trains a global parametric model from distributed datasets based on wireless communications. This paper proposes a unit-modulus over-the-air computation (UMAirComp) framework to facilitate efficient edge federated learning, which simultaneously uploads local model parameters and updates global model parameters via analog beamforming. The proposed framework avoids sophisticated baseband signal processing, leading to low communication delays and implementation costs. Training loss bounds of UMAirComp FL systems are derived and two low-complexity large-scale optimization algorithms, termed penalty alternating minimization (PAM) and accelerated gradient projection (AGP), are proposed to minimize the nonconvex nonsmooth loss bound. Simulation results show that the proposed UMAirComp framework with PAM algorithm achieves a smaller mean square error of model parameters’ estimation, training loss, and test error compared with other benchmark schemes. Moreover, the proposed UMAirComp framework with AGP algorithm achieves satisfactory performance while reduces the computational complexity by orders of magnitude compared with existing optimization algorithms. Finally, we demonstrate the implementation of UMAirComp in a vehicle-to-everything autonomous driving simulation platform. It is found that autonomous driving tasks are more sensitive to model parameter errors than other tasks since the neural networks for autonomous driving contain sparser model parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is deployed to assist the terahertz (THz) communications. The sum-rate of user equipments (UEs) is maximized while guaranteeing the rate requirement of each UE. A block coordinate searching (BCS) algorithm is proposed to jointly optimize the IRS’s coordinates, phase shifts, THz sub-bands allocation and power control. Specifically, the relaxation with penalties based (RPB) algorithm is developed to obtain feasible coordinates of the IRS and guarantee the monotonicity of objective value. In addition, the IRS phase shifts are formulated as closed-form expressions with introduced pricing factors. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly enhance system performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a computation offloading problem in a three-tier network consisting of multiple mobile users (MUs), multiple edge clouds, and a central cloud. On this basis, we formulate a system Energy Time Cost ($ETC$) minimization problem by jointly optimizing the resource allocation, mobile-edge matching decision, and offloading decision. Due to the difficulty of directly solving the formulated problem, we decompose it and propose two offloading algorithms, namely Gale-Shapley based Minimum/Sequential Offloading Algorithm (GS-MOA/GS-SOA), to optimize offloading decisions by minimizing the system $ETC$ , in which the mobile-edge matching strategies based on the proposed Gale-Shapley based Mobile-Edge mAtching aLgorithm (GS-MEAL) and resource allocations are optimized iteratively. The simulations show the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intra-session network coding has been shown to offer significant gains in terms of achievable throughput and delay in settings where one source multicasts data to several clients. In this paper, we consider a more general scenario where multiple sources transmit data to sets of clients over a wireline overlay network. We propose a novel framework for efficient rate allocation in networks where intermediate network nodes have the opportunity to combine packets from different sources using randomized network coding. We formulate the problem as the minimization of the average decoding delay in the client population and solve it with a gradient-based stochastic algorithm. Our optimized inter-session network coding solution is evaluated in different network topologies and is compared with basic intra-session network coding solutions. Our results show the benefits of proper coding decisions and effective rate allocation for lowering the decoding delay when the network is used by concurrent multicast sessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problems of minimizing the completion time and reducing decoding complexity for relay-aided wireless broadcast. Both network coding and scheduling problems are considered. A deterministic network coding algorithm is designed to select innovative encoding vectors, which is applicable to both the base station and the relay. The proposed algorithm can reduce decoding complexity significantly by selecting sparse encoding vectors. Integrating with the proposed network coding algorithm, a scheduling scheme based on dynamic programming is proposed, which is proved to be optimal in terms of minimizing expected completion time. Considering the size of state space and computational complexity of dynamic programming, a greedy scheduling algorithm is also proposed for practical implementation. Simulation shows that the proposed network coding algorithm and scheduling schemes work very well both in reducing completion time and in decoding complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I) communication holds great promise for significantly reducing the human and financial costs of vehicle collisions. A common characteristic of this communication is the broadcast of a device's core state information at regular intervals (e.g., vehicle speed and location or traffic signal state and timing). Unless controlled, the aggregate of these broadcasts will congest the channel under dense traffic scenarios, reducing the effectiveness of collision avoidance applications that use transmitted information. Active congestion control using distributed techniques is a topic of great interest for establishing the scalability of this technology. This paper defines a new adaptive congestion control algorithm that can be applied to the message rate of devices in this vehicular environment. While other published approaches rely on binary control, the LInear MEssage Rate Integrated Control (LIMERIC) algorithm takes advantage of full-precision control inputs that are available on the wireless channel. The result is provable convergence to fair and efficient channel utilization in the deterministic environment, under simple criteria for setting adaptive parameters. This “perfect” convergence avoids the limit cycle behavior that is inherent to binary control. We also discuss several practical aspects associated with implementing LIMERIC, including guidelines for the choice of system parameters to obtain desired utilization outcomes, a gain saturation technique that maintains robust convergence under all conditions, convergence with asynchronous updates, and using channel load to determine the aggregate message rate that is observable at a receiver. This paper also extends the convergence analysis for two important cases, i.e., measurement noise in the input signal and delay in the update process. This paper illustrates key analytical results using MATLAB numerical results and employs standard NS-2 simulations to demonstrate the performance of LIMERIC in several high-density scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we model a vehicular multihop network as an evolving graph and formulate the problem of optimal data dissemination over the network in terms of minimum number of transmissions. We show that the problem belongs to the NP complexity class and provide an easy to implement polynomial-time \2 \tau H(\Delta)-approximation algorithm, where \tau is the number of different subgraphs that comprise the evolving graph, and H(\Delta) is the harmonic number of the degree of the evolving graph. By means of applying our heuristic over a vehicular scenario generated by a microscopic road-traffic simulator, we provide some insight into the data dissemination issue. In addition, the proposed algorithm is employed to benchmark a state-of-the-art communication protocol. We hope this paper will inspire more efficient heuristics and data dissemination solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers a method for improving physical layer security of wireless networks with full-duplex radio. In particular, fast algorithms are developed to compute power allocations in subcarriers, subject to power and rate constraints, to maximize the secrecy capacity of a three-node network consisting of a source, a full-duplex destination, and an eavesdropper. A residual level of radio self-interference channel is considered. The optimal power allocation at the destination is found to be significant especially when its power budget is high. Also studied in this paper are a network with multiple full-duplex destinations and another network with multiple sources. Using the algorithms developed in this paper, we are able to show that a multiuser strategy that optimizes the power distributions among the users (in terms of either the sources or the destinations) can yield a substantial gain of secrecy capacity over a single-user strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses a spatial Aloha model to describe a distributed autonomous wireless network in which a group of transmit–receive pairs (users) shares a common collision channel via slotted-Aloha-like random access. The objective of this study is to develop an intelligent algorithm to be embedded into the transceivers so that all users know how to self-tune their medium access probability (MAP) to achieve overall Pareto optimality in terms of network throughput under spatial reuse while maintaining network stability. While the optimal solution requires each user to have complete information about the network, our proposed algorithm only requires users to have local information. The fundamental of our algorithm is that the users will first self-organize into a number of nonoverlapping neighborhoods, and the user with the maximum node degree in each neighborhood is elected as the local leader (LL). Each LL then adjusts its MAP according to a parameter R, which indicates the radio intensity level in its neighboring region, whereas the remaining users in the neighborhood simply follow the same MAP value. We show that by ensuring R \le \text{2} at the LLs, the stability of the entire network can be assured, even when each user only has partial network information. For practical implementation, we propose each LL to use R=\text{2}$ as the constant reference signal to its built-in proportional and integral controller. The settings of the control parameters are discussed, and we validate through simulations that the proposed method is able to achieve close-to-Pareto-front throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over-provisioned femtocell networks can be used to serve indoor locations that see high peak loads, such as airports or train stations. However, networks designed for high peak loads are mostly under-utilized, which is wasteful from an energy-use perspective. This paper introduces a femtocell selective activation problem. We motivate the use of selective activation in femtocell networks using real femtocell power measurements. We formally define the selective activation problem, and introduce GreenFemto, a distributed femtocell selective activation algorithm. We prove that GreenFemto converges to a locally Pareto optimal solution. Detailed simulations of an LTE wireless system are used to demonstrate the performance of GreenFemto. We find that GreenFemto uses up to 55% fewer femtocells to serve a given load, relative to an existing femtocell power-saving technique. Furthermore, we show that GreenFemto comes within 15% of a globally optimal solution. We conclude that selective activation can be successfully applied to femtocell networks to both reduce power consumption, and reduce outage probabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Complementing traditional cellular networks with the option of integrated small cells and WiFi access points can be used to further boost the overall traffic capacity and service level. Small cells along with WiFi access points are projected to carry over 60 percent of all theglobal data traffic by 2015. With the integration of small cells on the radio access network levels, there is a focus on providing operators with more control over small cell selection while reducing the feedback burden. Altogether, these issues motivate the need for innovative distributed and autonomous association policies that operate on each user under the network operator’s control, utilizing only partial information, yet achieving near-optimal solutions for the network. In this paper, we propose a load-aware network selection approach applied to automated dynamic offset in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). In particular, we investigate the properties of a hierarchical (Stackelberg) Bayesian game framework, in which the macro cell dynamically chooses the offset about the state of the channel in order to guide users to perform intelligent network selection decisions between macro cell and small cell networks. We derive analytically the utility related to the channel quality perceived by users to obtain the equilibria, and compare it to the fully centralized (optimal), the full channel state information and the non-cooperative (autonomous) models. Building upon these results, we effectively address the problem of how to intelligently configure a dynamic offset which optimizes network’s global utility while users maximize their individual utilities. One of the technical contributions of the paper lies in obtaining explicit characterizations of the dynamic offset at the equilibrium and the related performances in terms of the price of anarchy. Interestingly, it turns out that the complexity of the algorithm for finding the dynamic offset of the Stackelberg model is \mathcal O(n^4) (where $n$ is the number of users). It is shown that the proposed hierarchical mechanism keeps the price of anarchy almost equal to $1$ even for a low number of users, and remains bounded above by the non-cooperative model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]