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Ultradense heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are emerging as an inevitable approach to tackle the capacity crunch in cellular networks. However, imbalanced load among small and macrocells and poor resource utilization as a consequence in HetNets remains a long-standing problem. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a solution for maximization of coverage and capacity while minimizing load imbalance among macro and small cells. Most recent studies on the topic focus on either optimization of coverage, capacity or load, or a combination of two of these three intertwined objectives. We formulate the optimization problem as a function of two hard parameters namely antenna tilt and transmit power, and a soft parameter, cell individual offset, that affect the coverage, capacity, and load directly. The resulting solution is a combination of the otherwise conflicting coverage and capacity optimization (CCO) and load balancing (LB) self-organizing network (SON) functions. In the presented joint CCO-LB solution, a conflict free operation of CCO and LB is ensured by designing a novel load aware user association methodology and resolving the effects of shadowing on coverage probability using stochastic approximation. The problem is proven to be nonconvex and is solved using genetic algorithm, sequential quadratic programming, and pattern search algorithms. The proposed CCO-LB solution is compared against two recently proposed CCO and CCO-LB solutions in the literature. Results show that the proposed solution can yield significant gain in terms of throughput, spectral efficiency, and load distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present in this paper a novel proactive interference avoidance scheme for mobile-to-mobile (M2M) communication as an underlay in Long-Term Evolution (LTE) downlink networks. The proposed scheme introduces an intelligent user-selective resource allocation algorithm that aims to proactively avoid interference between M2M pairs and LTE regular users while achieving a satisfactory link budget for both M2M and LTE regular links. The proposed resource allocation algorithm is based on a novel low-complexity interference estimation approach that requires only channel quality indicator (CQI) information (CSI). Since the CQI reporting mechanism has been already implemented in current LTE systems, the proposed algorithm is indeed practical and standard compatible, compared with the existing works that require perfect knowledge of the channel state information (CSI). In this research, achievable data throughput with LTE-compliant adaptive modulation and coding has been adopted as the optimization measurement, rather than the information-theoretic capacity. Therefore, the performance of the proposed scheme is practically realizable in LTE communication systems. Since the performance of the proposed scheme highly relies on the accuracy of CQI feedback, we also carry out performance analysis to evaluate the impact of CQI estimation error and delay. The simulation results show that the total achievable data throughput for LTE networks is dramatically enhanced by M2M communication with this proposed interference avoidance resource allocation scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In heterogeneous networks (HetNets), the load between macrocell base stations (MBSs) and small-cell base stations (SBSs) is imbalanced due to their different transmission powers and locations. This load imbalance significantly impacts system performance and affects the experience of mobile users (MUs) with different priorities. In this paper, we aim to distributively optimize the user association in HetNets with various user priorities to solve the load balancing problem. Since the user association is a binary matching problem, which is NP-hard, we propose a distributed belief propagation (BP) algorithm to approach the optimal solution. We first develop a factor graph model, using the network topology, to represent this user association problem. With this factor graph, we propose a novel distributed BP algorithm by adopting the proportional fairness as the objective. Next, we theoretically prove the existence of the fixed point in our BP algorithm. To be more practical, we develop an approximation method to significantly reduce the computational and communication complexity of the BP algorithm. Furthermore, we analyze some properties of the factor graph relevant to the performance of the BP algorithm using the stochastic geometry. Simulation results show that 1) the proposed BP algorithm well approaches the optimal system performance and achieves a much better performance compared with other association schemes and that 2) the analytical results on the average degree distribution and sparsity of the factor graph match with those obtained from the Monte Carlo simulations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cross-layer utility maximization problem, which is subject to stability constraints for a multicommodity wireless network where all links share the same number of orthogonal channels, is considered in this paper. We assume a time-slotted network, where the channel gains randomly change from one slot to another. The optimal cross-layer network control policy can be decomposed into the folloing three subproblems: 1) flow control; 2) next-hop routing and in -node scheduling; and 3) power and rate control, which is also known as resource allocation (RA). These subproblems span the layers from the physical layer to the transport layer. In every time slot, a network controller decides the amount of each commodity data admitted to the network layer, schedules different commodities over the network's links, and controls the power and rate allocated to every link in every channel. To fully exploit the available multichannel diversity, we consider the general case, where multiple links can be activated in the same channel during the same time slot, and the interference is controlled solely through power and rate control. Unfortunately, the RA subproblem is not yet amendable to a convex formulation, and in fact, it is NP-hard. The main contribution of this paper is to develop efficient RA algorithms for multicommodity multichannel wireless networks by applying complementary geometric programming and homotopy methods to analyze the quantitative impact of gains that can be achieved at the network layer in terms of end-to-end rates and network congestion by incorporating different RA algorithms. Although the global optimality of the solution cannot be guaranteed, the numerical results show that the proposed algorithms perform close to the (exponentially complex) optimal solution methods. Moreover, they efficiently exploit the available multichannel diversity, which provides significant gains at the network layer in terms of end-to-end rates and network congestion. In addition, the assessment of the improvement in performance due to the use of multiuser detectors at the receivers is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

Cognitive radio (CR) is currently one of the most promising solutions for designing spectrum-efficient wireless communication systems. In this paper, we present a greedy cognitive access policy that handles spectrum sensing with the tools of image processing. By means of the Wigner–Ville transform (WVT), we are able to analyze the time and frequency features of the received interference, and represent them on a time–frequency grid as an image in which brightness reveals the spectrum occupancy. According to sensed interference, each secondary user autonomously tries to access the grid following a multiple-division principle, i.e., by properly shaping the signal in the code, time, and frequency domains. In detail, this is realized by processing the WVT to derive the shaping mask (and the matching algorithm) that allows the filling up of the “time spectrum holes.” Numerical simulations and a test-bed implementation show how the proposed scheme outperforms selected state-of-the-art approaches while still presenting an affordable computational cost. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key challenges in wireless networking is allocating the available radio resources to maximize key service delivery parameters such as the aggregate throughput and the multimedia quality of experience (QoE). We propose a novel and effective scheduling policy that allocates resource blocks, such that interference power is shifted toward capacity-saturated users, while improving the throughput of unsaturated users. The highlight of this paper is that the proposed scheme can dramatically improve the performance of cells that have a high discrepancy in its signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) distribution, which is typical in urban areas. The results show that a free-lunch (FL) solution is possible, whereby for negligible performance degradation in the saturated users, a large improvement in the nonsaturated users can be obtained. However, on average, the number of FL user pairings is low. By relaxing the degradation constraints, the non-FL (NFL) solution can yield a greater multiuser throughput gain. Motivated by a surge in mobile multimedia traffic, we further demonstrate that the proposed scheduling may have a profound impact on both energy efficiency and QoE of multimedia service delivery. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates transmit antenna selection for linearly precoded multiuser multiple-input–multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems. First, in some precoded single-user MIMO systems, using all transmit antennas does not always lead to the best performance due to ill-conditioned channel matrices. This condition motivates us to investigate whether a similar result can be obtained in MU-MIMO systems. Based on the derived analytical results, we found that, for a given number of transmit antennas, decreasing the number of active transmit antennas [number of radio frequency (RF) units] always degrades system performance in the linearly precoded MU-MIMO systems. However, in practical systems, RF units are expensive. To reduce the hardware cost, antenna selection is usually used to reduce the number of RF units. Thus, we further analyze the performance loss due to transmit antenna selection (TAS). These analytical results provide good design references for using TAS in practical systems. Moreover, based on the analytical results, we proposed several simple TAS algorithms for linearly precoded MU-MIMO systems. Complexity analysis and simulation results show that the computational complexity of the proposed algorithms can significantly be reduced, whereas the performance is still comparable with the optimal selection scheme. As a result, the analyzed results enable us to better understand how TAS affects the MU-MIMO systems. In addition, the proposed algorithms make TAS more feasible to be used in practical systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In wireless communication systems with multiple users, the near–far effect and the cochannel interferences decrease the spectral efficiency and system performance. An efficient known method to combat these destructive effects is to properly adjust the transmit powers. A practical and efficient way for power control (PC) in cellular communication systems is the autonomous distributed PC (DPC). In this method, the transmit power of each link is independently modified based on the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) reported from the other side of that link. It is known that in a perfect scenario where the reported SINRs are exact, this algorithm converges to the optimum transmit powers. However, in the case of erroneous SINR reports, the transmit powers deviate from their optimum values. This paper addresses the destructive effect of inaccurate SINR reports on the performance of a DPC algorithm. Then, independent variable step-sizes that update the transmit powers are proposed, and convergence of the proposed DPC algorithm to the optimum solution of the original problem is analytically shown. Additionally, a protocol to adaptively tune the step-sizes in our algorithm, which improves the performance of PC in the presence of inaccurate SINR reports, is proposed. Computer simulations are used to study the performance of the proposed method in terms of both the speed of converges and the steady-state accuracy of link qualities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]