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In 5G and beyond communication systems, the notion of latency gets great momentum in wireless connectivity as a metric for serving real-time communications requirements. However, in many applications, research has pointed out that latency could be inefficient to handle applications with data freshness requirements. Recently, Age of Information (AoI) metric, which can capture the freshness of the data, has attracted a lot of attention. In this work, we consider mixed traffic with time-sensitive users; a deadline-constrained user, and an AoI-oriented user. To develop an efficient scheduling policy, we cast a novel optimization problem formulation for minimizing the average AoI while satisfying the timely throughput constraints. The formulated problem is cast as a Constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP). We relax the constrained problem to an unconstrained Markov Decision Process (MDP) problem by utilizing the Lyapunov optimization theory and it can be proved that it is solved per frame by applying backward dynamic programming algorithms with optimality guarantees. In addition, we provide a low-complexity algorithm guaranteeing that the timely-throughput constraint is satisfied. Simulation results show that the timely throughput constraints are satisfied while minimizing the average AoI. Simulation results show the convergence of the algorithms for different values of the weighted factor and the trade-off between the AoI and the timely throughput., Funding Agencies|European Research Council [101044629]; Swedish Research Council (VR); ELLIIT; Zenith; European Union [101096526]

In this work, we combine the two notions of timely delivery of information to study their interplay; namely, deadline -constrained packet delivery due to latency constraints and freshness of information. More specifically, we consider a two -user multiple access setup with random access, in which user 1 is a wireless device with a buffer and has external bursty traffic which is deadline-constrained, while user 2 monitors a sensor and transmits status updates to the destination. We provide analytical expressions for the throughput and drop probability of user 1. For user 2, we derive in closed form the age of information distribution, the average age of information (AoI), and the probability the AoI to be larger than a certain value for each time slot. The relations reveal a trade-off between the average AoI of user 2 and the drop rate of user 1: the lower the average AoI, the higher the drop rate, and vice versa. Simulations corroborate the validity of our theoretical results., Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council (VR); CENIIT; Academy of Finland [317726]

We present our vision for a departure from the established way of architecting and assessing communication networks, by incorporating the semantics of information, defined not necessarily as the meaning of the messages, but as their significance, possibly within a real-time constraint, relative to the purpose of the data exchange. We argue that research efforts must focus on laying the theoretical foundations of a redesign of the entire process of information generation, transmission, and usage for networked systems in unison by developing advanced semantic metrics for communications and control systems; an optimal sampling theory combining signal sparsity and timeliness, for real-time prediction/reconstruction/control under communication constraints and delays; temporally effective compressed sensing techniques for decision making and inference directly in the compressed domain; and semantic-aware data generation, channel coding, packetization, feedback, and multiple and random access schemes that reduce the volume of data and the energy consumption, increasing the number of supportable devices. This paradigm shift targets jointly optimal information gathering, information dissemination, and decision making policies in networked systems.

Future wireless networks will be characterized by users with heterogeneous requirements. Such users can require low-latency or minimum-throughput requirements. In addition, due to the limited-power budget of the mobile devices, a power-efficient scheduling scheme is required by the network. In this work, we cast a stochastic network optimization problem for minimizing the packet drop rate while guaranteeing a minimum throughput and taking into account the limited-power capabilities of the users., Funding Agencies|Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT); Swedish Research Council (VR)

Future wireless networks will be characterized by heterogeneous traffic requirements. Examples can be low-latency or minimum-througput requirements. Therefore, the network has to adjust to different needs. Usually, users with low-latency requirements have to deliver their demand within a specific time frame, i.e., before a deadline, and they coexist with throughput oriented users. In addition, mobile devices have a limited-power budget and therefore, a power-efficient scheduling scheme is required by the network. In this work, we cast a stochastic network optimization problem for minimizing the packet drop rate while guaranteeing a minimum throughput and taking into account the limited-power capabilities of the users. We apply tools from Lyapunov optimization theory in order to provide an algorithm, named Dynamic Power Control (DPC) algorithm, that solves the formulated problem in real time. It is proved that the DPC algorithm gives a solution arbitrarily close to the optimal one. Simulation results show that our algorithm outperforms the baseline Largest-Debt-First (LDF) algorithm for short deadlines and multiple users.

A typical Internet-of-Things (IoT) system consists of three major layers: 1) sensing; 2) communication; and 3) application (i.e., actuation and control) layers. The co-design of these layers has been studied for over two decades, dating back to the concept of communication, computing, and control, i.e., 3C, convergence in the 1990s. Nowadays, with the emergence of wireless-networked machine-type applications, such as connected autonomous driving and factory automation, this co-design is more urgently desired than ever to meet the stringent quality-of-service requirements thereof. To realize this goal, the 5G wireless network of today has mainly focused on the communication part and strived to reliably achieve low air-interface communication delay, i.e., ultra-reliable and low-latency communications (uRLLC). However, more and more wireless communications in IoT are based on status updates instead of general content delivery. The current uRLLC design is insufficient to characterize the status update quality, and thus is unable to optimize for timely status update with constrained wireless resources. Therefore, the performance of computing and control in IoT networks that rely highly on wireless communications is suboptimal.

In this work, we investigate information freshness in a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link. Initially, we study the properties of a sample path of the age of information (AoI) process at the destination. We obtain a general formula of the stationary distribution of the AoI, under the assumption of ergodicity. We relate this result to a discrete time queueing system and provide a general expression of the generating function of AoI in relation with the system time and the peak age of information (PAoI) metric. Furthermore, we consider three different single-server system models and we obtain closed-form expressions of the generating functions and the stationary distributions of the AoI and the PAoI. The first model is a first-come-first-served (FCFS) queue, the second model is a preemptive last-come-first-served (LCFS) queue, and the last model is a bufferless system with packet dropping. We build upon these results to provide a methodology for analyzing general non-linear age functions for this type of systems, using representations of functions as power series., Funding Agencies|European UnionEuropean Commission [642743]; ELLIIT; Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT); U.S. Office of Naval ResearchOffice of Naval Research [ONR 5-280542]; U.S. National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) [CIF 5-243150, 5-245770, CIF 5-231912]; Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council

In this work, we combine the two notions of timely delivery of information to study their interplay; namely, deadline-constrained packet delivery due to latency constraints and freshness of information. More specifically, we consider a two-user multiple access setup with random-access, in which user 1 is a wireless device with a queue and has external bursty traffic which is deadline-constrained, while user 2 monitors a sensor and transmits status updates to the destination. We provide analytical expressions for the throughput and drop probability of user 1, and an analytical expression for the average Age of Information (AoI) of user 2 monitoring the sensor. The relations reveal that there is a trade-off between the average AoI of user 2 and the drop rate of user 1: the lower the average AoI, the higher the drop rate, and vice versa. Simulations corroborate the validity of our theoretical results., Funding Agencies|Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council; CENIIT; Academy of FinlandAcademy of FinlandEuropean Commission [317726]

We consider a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link. A stochastic process is observed at the source, where samples are extracted at random time instances, and delivered to the destination, thus, providing status updates for the source. In this paper, we expand the concept of information ageing by introducing the cost of update delay (CoUD) metric to characterize the cost of having stale information at the destination. The CoUD captures the freshness of the information at the destination and can be used to reflect the information structure of the source. Moreover, we introduce the value of information of update (VoIU) metric that captures the reduction of CoUD upon reception of an update. Using the CoUD, its by-product metric called peak cost of update delay (PCoUD), and the VoIU, we evaluate the performance of an M/M/1 system in various settings that consider exact expressions and bounds. The optimal server utilization policy is to minimize the time average CoUD and maximize the time average VoIU. Our results indicate that the performance of CoUD differs depending on the cost assigned per time unit, however the optimal policy remains the same for linear ageing and varies for non-linear ageing. When it comes to the VoIU the performance difference appears only when the cost increases non-linearly with time. The study illustrates the importance of the newly introduced variants of age, furthermore supported in the case of VoIU by its tractability., Funding Agencies|European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie GrantEuropean Union (EU) [642743]; ELLIIT; Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT); U.S. Office of Naval ResearchOffice of Naval Research [ONR 5280542]; U.S. National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) [CIF 5-243150, Nets 5-245770, CIF 5-231912]; Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council

Link scheduling, i.e., which links should transmit together and for how long, has been and remains a cornerstone optimization problem in wireless networking. In minimum-time scheduling, the task is to minimize the amount of time before emptying the data demand residing at the source nodes. We derive a complete structural characterization of the solution that unifies and significantly extends the known results. First, we approach link scheduling with a general system model without restrictions on the shape of the achievable rate region. Then, we give and prove a solution characterization of optimality that is conceptually simple yet powerful. We demonstrate several applications of this characterization for analysis of optimality and problem tractability. Next, we consider a significant extension by including deadline constraints, under which optimal scheduling becomes much more complex. Yet, we show how our formulation yields a solution description for that problem as well., Funding Agencies|Swedish Research CouncilSwedish Research Council; National Science FoundationNational Science Foundation (NSF) [CCF-0728966, CCF-1420651]; ONROffice of Naval Research [N000141410107]; European UnionEuropean Union (EU)

This paper considers a status update communication system consisting of a source-destination link with timeliness requirements. First, we study the properties of a sample path of the age of information (AoI) process at the destination. Under the assumption of ergodicity, we obtain a general formula of the stationary distribution of the AoI. We relate this result to a discrete time queueing system and provide a general expression of the generating function of AoI in relation with the system time and the peak age of information (PAoI). Furthermore, we consider the first-come-first-served (FCFS) Geo/Geo/1 queue and we obtain closed-form expressions of the generating functions and the stationary distributions of the AoI and the PAoI. We built upon these results to provide a methodology for analyzing general non-linear age functions for this type of systems., Funding Agencies|Horizon 2020 Grant, CENIIT, ELLIIT [642743]; Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council

We consider the problem of minimizing the time average cost of sampling and transmitting status updates by users over a wireless channel subject to average Age of Information constraints (AoI). Errors in the transmission may occur and the scheduling algorithm has to decide if the users sample a new packet or attempt for retransmission of the packet sampled previously. The cost consists of both sampling and transmission costs. The sampling of a new packet after a failure imposes an additional cost in the system. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem with time average cost in the objective under time average AoI constraints. To solve this problem, we apply tools from Lyapunov optimization theory and develop a dynamic algorithm that takes decisions in a slot-by-slot basis. The algorithm decides if a user: a) samples a new packet, b) transmits the old one, c) remains silent. We provide optimality guarantees of the algorithm and study its performance in terms of time average cost and AoI through simulation results., Funding Agencies|Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT); Swedish Research Council (VR)Swedish Research Council; ELLIIT

Conventional cognitive communications rely heavily on the smartness of secondary (unlicensed) users (SUs) to achieve high spectrum utilization, which involves the optimization of the SUs policies and behaviors for dynamic spectrum access, power allocation among multiple channels, etc. Due to the inherent randomness of the primary users (PUs) transmission, those efforts inevitably increase the implementation complexity and sensing overheads of the SUs, and in turn lower the spectrum utilization efficiency. In this paper, we try to change the focus from SU to PU. A cooperative traffic allocation strategy for PU, together with the non-uniform bandwidth partition, is employed to regularize the PUs resource occupancy pattern without compromising its performance, and to maximize the spare bandwidth for the SU at the same time. We first study the capacity based optimization problem (COP) together with the fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for an approximation guarantee of the global optimum. Then we analyze the subcarrier based optimization problem as the surrogate problem of COP, which can be solved by a greedy algorithm exactly. Both the theoretical analysis and the numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of those methods to achieve the performance that almost identical to that of the global optimum solution., Funding Agencies|China Scholar Council (CSC) [201206155005]; Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (CHINA)National Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province [S2011010004773]; European FP7 Marie Curie IOF projectEuropean Union (EU) [329313]; NSFNational Science Foundation (NSF) [CCF1420651]; ONROffice of Naval Research [N000141410107]

We consider a system consisting of N source nodes communicating with a common receiver. Each source node has a buffer of infinite capacity to store incoming bursty traffic in the form of status updates transmitted in packets, which should maintain the status information at the receiver fresh. Packets waiting for transmission can be discarded to avoid wasting network resources for the transmission of stale information. We investigate the age of information (AoI) performance of the system under scheduled and random access. Moreover, we present analysis of the AoI with and without packet management at the transmission queue of the source nodes, where as packet management we consider the capability to replace unserved packets at the queue whenever newer ones arrive. Finally, we provide simulation results that illustrate the impact of the network operating parameters on the age performance of the different access protocols., Funding Agencies|European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant [642743]; ELLIIT; Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT); U.S. Office of Naval Research [ONR 5-280542]; U.S. National Science Foundation [CIF 5-243150, 5-245770, CIF 5-231912]; Swedish Research Council (VR)

We consider a system consisting of a source-destination communication link. At the transmitter of the source there is a buffer that stores packets containing status information. These randomly generated packets should keep the destination timely updated and they can be discarded to avoid wasting network resources for the transmission of stale information. In this setup, we provide an analysis of the age of information (AoI) and peak age of information (PAoI) performance of the system, with and without packet management at the transmission queue of the source node. The analysis indicates the potential performance gains obtained with the use of packet management., Funding Agencies|Horizon 2020 [642743]

In this paper, we consider the two-user broadcast channel and we characterize its stable throughput region. We start the analysis by providing the stability region for the general case without any specific considerations on transmission and reception mechanisms. We also provide conditions for the stable throughput region to be convex. Subsequently, we study the case where the transmitter uses superposition coding and we consider two special cases for the receivers. The first one is when both receivers treat interference as noise. The second is when the user with a better channel uses successive decoding and the other receiver treats interference as noise., Funding Agencies|People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013/ under REA grant [612361]; European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant [643002]; ELLIIT; CENIIT

Information age is a recently introduced metric to represent the freshness of information in communication systems. We investigate age minimization in a wireless network and propose a novel approach of optimizing the scheduling strategy to deliver all messages as fresh as possible. Specifically, we consider a set of links that share a common channel. The transmitter at each link contains a given number of packets with time stamps from an information source that generated them. We address the link transmission scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the overall age. This minimum age scheduling problem (MASP) is different from minimizing the time or the delay for delivering the packets in question. We model the MASP mathematically and prove it is NP-hard in general. We also identify tractable cases as well as optimality conditions. An integer linear programming formulation is provided for performance benchmarking. Moreover, a steepest age descent algorithm with better scalability is developed. Numerical study shows that, by employing the optimal schedule, the overall age is significantly reduced in comparison to other scheduling strategies., Funding Agencies|EC Marie Curie Actions Projects MESH-WISE [324515]; Career LTE [329313]; National Science Foundation [CCF-0728966, CCF-1420651]; ONR [N000141410107]

In this work, we study the benefit of partial relay cooperation. We consider a two-node system consisting of one source and one relay node transmitting information to a common destination. The source and the relay have external traffic and in addition, the relay is equipped with a flow controller to regulate the incoming traffic from the source node. The cooperation is performed at the network level. A collision channel with erasures is considered. We provide an exact characterization of the stability region of the system and we also prove that the system with partial cooperation is always better or at least equal to the system without the flow controller., Funding agencies: People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme FP7/under REA [[612361]-SOrBet]; EU project DECADE [H2020-MSCA-2014-RISE: 645705]; European Union [642743]; MURI [W911NF-08-1-0238]; NSF [CCF1420651]; ONR [N00014141

We consider a cognitive shared access scheme consisting of a high priority primary node and a low priority network with N secondary nodes accessing the spectrum. Assuming bursty traffic at the primary node, saturated queues at the secondary nodes, and multipacket reception capabilities at the receivers, we derive analytical expressions of the time average age of information of the primary node and the throughput of the secondary nodes. We formulate two optimization problems, the first aiming to minimize the time average age of information of the primary node subject to an aggregate secondary throughput requirement. The second problem aims to maximize the aggregate secondary throughput of the network subject to a maximum time average staleness constraint. Our results provide guidelines for the design of a multiple access system with multipacket reception capabilities that fulfills both timeliness and throughput requirements., Funding agencies: European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant [642743]

Wireless devices need to adapt their transmission power according to the fluctuating wireless channel in order to meet constraints of delay sensitive applications. In this paper, we consider delay sensitivity in the form of strict packet deadlines arriving in a transmission queue. Packets missing the deadline while in the queue are dropped from the system. We aim at minimizing the packet drop rate under average power constraints. We utilize tools from Lyapunov optimization to find an approximate solution by selecting power allocation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and show that it achieves the same performance in terms of packet drop rate with that of the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) when the available power is sufficient. However, our algorithm outperforms EDF regarding the trade-off between packet drop rate and average power consumption., Funding Agencies|European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant [643002, 642743]; Center for Industrial Information Technology (CENIIT)

We consider a real-time status update system consisting of a source-destination network. A stochastic process is observed at the source, and samples, so called status updates, are extracted at random time instances, and delivered to the destination. In this paper, we expand the concept of information ageing by introducing the Cost of Update Delay (CoUD) metric to characterize the cost of having stale information at the destination. We introduce the Value of Information of Update (VoIU) metric that captures the reduction of CoUD upon reception of an update. The importance of the VoIU metric lies on its tractability which enables an alternative performance criterion in status update systems.

We consider link scheduling in wireless networks for emptying the queues at the transmitters in minimum time, with time constraints, or deadlines, for one or multiple individual links. We formulate the minimum-time scheduling problem with deadlines (MTSD) mathematically and derive the optimal activation order of the link sets in a schedule solution. Theoretical results are obtained, showing that the MTSD can be treated as the conventional minimum-time scheduling problem by "absorbing" the deadline constraints into the rate region where the scheduling problem is defined. By this approach, optimality characterization and geometric interpretation for the MTSD are provided. Furthermore, we extend the results to the MTSD in a general form that accommodates an arbitrary rate region.

We address the maximum link activation problem in wireless networks with new features, namely when the transmitters can perform cooperative transmission, and the receivers are able to perform successive interference cancellation. In this new problem setting, which transmitters should transmit and to whom, as well as the optimal cancellation patterns at the receivers, are strongly intertwined. We present contributions along three lines. First, we provide a thorough tractability analysis, proving the NP-hardness as well as identifying tractable cases. Second, for benchmarking purposes, we deploy integer linear programming for achieving global optimum using off-theshelf optimization methods. Third, to overcome the scalability issue of integer programming, we design a sub-optimal but efficient optimization algorithm for the problem in its general form, by embedding maximum-weighted bipartite matching into local search. Numerical results are presented for performance evaluation, to validate the benefit of cooperative transmission and interference cancellation for maximum link activation and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm., Funding agencies: Swedish Research Council; EU FP7 Marie Curie [324515, 329313]; National Science Foundation [CCF-0728966, CCF-1420651]; ONR [N000141410107]

In this paper, the impact of energy constraints on a two hop network with a source, a relay and a destination under random medium access is studied. A collision channel with erasures is considered, and the source and the relay nodes have energy harvesting capabilities and an unlimited battery to store the harvested energy. Additionally, the source and the relay node have external traffic arrivals and the relay forwards a fraction of the source nodes traffic to the destination; the cooperation is performed at the network level. An inner and an outer bound of the stability region for a given transmission probability vector are obtained. Then, the closure of the inner and the outer bound is obtained separately and they turn out to be identical. This work is not only a step in connecting information theory and networking, by studying the maximum stable throughput region metric but also it taps the relatively unexplored and important domain of energy harvesting and assesses the effect of that on this important measure., Funding Agencies|People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme FP7 under REA grant [612361]; MURI grant [W911NF-08-1-0238]; NSF [CCF1420651]; ONR [N000141410107]DOI does not work: 10.1109/JCN.2016.000035

Dynamic spectrum sensing and opportunistic access in cognitive communications enable secondary users to recognize and utilize the white spaces of the licensed bandwidth. Our prior work proposed a non-uniform scheme of bandwidth partition and traffic allocation with the aim of regularizing the primary users (PUs) bandwidth occupancy pattern, which was able to improve the performance of the secondary user (SU). In the current paper, we study the non-uniform scheme under fading situations. The optimal bandwidth allocation under fading situations is defined as maximizing the spare capacity for the SU subject to satisfying the PUs demand. The problem is proved to be NP-hard. To lower the computational overhead, we further study the problem of maximizing the spare subcarriers for the SU, and propose an optimal algorithm for the PU traffic allocation with polynomial time complexity. By numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the algorithm is able to achieve almost identical performance to that of the optimal solution of the original problem. In addition, the non-uniform scheme, which is based on that algorithm, exhibits better performance than the uniform one even under fading situations.

We consider a wireless network with a set of transmitter-receiver pairs, or links, that share a common channel, and address the problem of emptying finite traffic volume from the transmitters in minimum time. This, so called, minimum-time scheduling problem has been proved to be NP-hard in general. In this paper, we study a class of minimum-time scheduling problems in which the link rates have a particular structure. We show that global optimality can be reached in polynomial time and derive optimality conditions. Then we consider a more general case in which we apply the same approach and obtain an approximation as well as lower and upper bounds to the optimal solution. Simulation results confirm and validate our approach., At the time for thesis presentation publication was in status: Manuscript

We consider link scheduling in wireless networks for emptying the queues of the source nodes, and provide a unified mathematical formulation that accommodates all meaningful settings of link transmission rates and network configurations. We prove that, any scheduling problem is equivalent to solving a convex problem defined over the convex hull of the rate region. Based on the fundamental insight, a general optimality condition is derived, that yields a unified treatment of optimal scheduling. Furthermore, we demonstrate the implications and usefulness of the result. Specifically, by applying the theoretical insight to optimality characterization and complexity analysis of scheduling problems, we can both unify and extend previously obtained results.

Freshness of information is of critical importance for a host of applications of wireless communications. In order to deliver information from multiple sources in a timely and fair fashion through a wireless channel, we propose optimizing the link scheduling strategy in respect of age of information, which is a newly introduced metric that measures how fresh information is. Specifically, we consider a set of co-channel links, each having a number of packets to be delivered, and address the problem that aims to find the optimal scheduling solution, such that the maximum peak age of information is minimized. We mathematically formulate this so-called min-max peak age scheduling problem (MPASP), and prove it is NP-hard. Theoretical insights including tractable cases and optimality properties are derived. For problem solution, an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation is proposed. We also develop a sub-optimal, but fast, algorithm to solve the problem with better scalability. Numerical study shows that, by employing the optimal schedule, the maximum peak age is significantly reduced in comparison to other classic scheduling strategies such as minimum-time scheduling.

There is a growing interest in age of information, which is a newly introduced metric that measures the freshness of information in communication systems. We investigate the age of information in wireless networks and propose the novel approach of optimizing the scheduling strategy to deliver the information as timely as possible. We consider a set of links that share a common channel, each containing a number of packets with time stamps, and address the scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing the overall information age. We model this problem mathematically and prove it is NP-hard in general. Fundamental insights including tractable cases and optimality conditions are presented. An integer linear programming formulation is provided for performance benchmarking. Moreover, a steepest age decent algorithm with better scalability is developed. Numerical study shows that, by employing the optimal schedule, the overall information age is significantly reduced in comparison to other scheduling strategies.

The effect of full-duplex cooperative relaying in a random access multiuser network is investigated here. First, we model the self-interference incurred due to full-duplex operation, assuming multi-packet reception capabilities for both the relay and the destination node. Traffic at the source nodes is considered saturated and the cooperative relay, which does not have packets of its own, stores a source packet that it receives successfully in its queue when the transmission to the destination has failed. We obtain analytical expressions for key performance metrics at the relay, such as arrival and service rates, stability conditions, and average queue length, as functions of the transmission probabilities, the self interference coefficient, and the links outage probabilities. Furthermore, we study the impact of the relay node and the self-interference coefficient on the per-user and aggregate throughput, and the average delay per packet. We show that perfect self-interference cancelation plays a crucial role when the SINR threshold is small, since it may result to worse performance in throughput and delay comparing with the half-duplex case. This is because perfect self-interference cancelation can cause an unstable queue at the relay under some conditions., Funding Agencies|People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Seventh Framework Programme FP7 under REA grant [612361]; NSF [CCF1420651]; ONR [N000141410107]

In cognitive communication, dynamic sensing and opportunistic access enable secondary users to recognize and utilize the white spaces of the licensed bandwidth. Most present efforts focus on designing smarter channel sensing and access algorithms for secondary users, with the aim of optimizing the overall throughput and bandwidth utilization efficiency, under the condition of not interfering with primary users communication. However, as the transmissions of the primary users are inherently random and unpredictable, sensing and sharing spectrum with the primary users inevitably make the cognitive process of the secondary users complex and ineffective. In this paper, a non-uniform bandwidth allocation scheme is proposed that regularizes the primary users bandwidth occupancy pattern. The regularization is not designed to reshape the primary userss traffic, but to improve the sensing efficiency and throughput of the secondary users by optimizing the spectrum allocation. After the description of the new allocation scheme, we demonstrate its performance by theoretic analysis. Then we verify the validity of the non-uniform scheme with numerical simulations under non-fading and fading situations respectively. Through comparisons with the conventional uniform bandwidth allocation scheme, the non-uniform one shows higher sensing efficiency and better spectrum utilization due to lower sensing cost and reduced bandwidth loss., Funding Agencies|China Scholar Council (CSC) [201206155005]; Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (CHINA) [S2011010004773]; NSF [CCF1420651]; ONR [N000141410107]; European FP7 Marie Curie IOF project [329313]

In cognitive communication, dynamic sensing and opportunistic accessing enable secondary users to recognize and utilize the white spaces of the licensed bandwidth. Most present efforts focus on designing smarter channel sensing and access algorithms for secondary users to optimize the overall throughput and bandwidth utilization efficiency, without interfering with primary users communication. However, the transmission of the primary users are basically random and unpredictable, which usually makes the cognitive process complex and ineffective. In this paper, a non-uniform bandwidth allocation scheme is proposed, in order to regularize primary users bandwidth occupancy, which can in turn improve the sensing efficiency and throughput of the secondary users. The performance benefits are demonstrated analytically and verified by numerical simulations. In comparison to the conventional uniform bandwidth allocation scheme, the non-uniform scheme shows a higher sensing efficiency and spectrum utilization due to less bandwidth loss and lower sensing cost.