Search

Learning of the cell-load in radio access networks (RANs) has to be performed within a short time period. Therefore, we propose a learning framework that is robust against uncertainties resulting from the need for learning based on a relatively small training sample set. To this end, we incorporate prior knowledge about the cell-load in the learning framework. For example, an inherent property of the cell-load is that it is monotonic in downlink (data) rates. To obtain additional prior knowledge we first study the feasible rate region, i.e., the set of all vectors of user rates that can be supported by the network. We prove that the feasible rate region is compact. Moreover, we show the existence of a Lipschitz function that maps feasible rate vectors to cell-load vectors. With these results in hand, we present a learning technique that guarantees a minimum approximation error in the worst-case scenario by using prior knowledge and a small training sample set. Simulations in the network simulator NS3 demonstrate that the proposed method exhibits better robustness and accuracy than standard multivariate learning techniques, especially for small training sample sets., Comment: Published in IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing ( Volume: 68)

In this paper, we propose an iterative algorithm to address the nonconvex multi-group multicast beamforming problem with quality-of-service constraints and per-antenna power constraints. We formulate a convex relaxation of the problem as a semidefinite program in a real Hilbert space, which allows us to approximate a point in the feasible set by iteratively applying a bounded perturbation resilient fixed-point mapping. Inspired by the superiorization methodology, we use this mapping as a basic algorithm, and we add in each iteration a small perturbation with the intent to reduce the objective value and the distance to nonconvex rank-constraint sets. We prove that the sequence of perturbations is bounded, so the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a feasible point of the relaxed semidefinite program. Simulations show that the proposed approach outperforms existing algorithms in terms of both computation time and approximation gap in many cases.

This study considers the channel covariance conversion problem, which consists in estimating the spatial covariance matrix of a wireless channel by exploiting measurements obtained on a different carrier frequency and stationarity properties of the propagation environment across sufficiently close frequency bands. The first contribution given in this study is a modelling framework based on infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces that unifies a plethora of classical and novel covariance models with different degrees of complexity and generality, while still effectively capturing important properties of the propagation environment and of the antenna array. Given this framework, this study addresses the channel covariance conversion problem by proposing two simple yet effective algorithms based on set-theoretic methods that outperform existing model-based approaches both in terms of accuracy and complexity. In particular, the first algorithm is implementable as a simple matrix-vector multiplication. Moreover, in contrast to the aforementioned approaches, both algorithms can be applied to general propagation and array models such as dual-polarized antenna arrays, making them suitable for modern 5 G and beyond systems.

In this study, we establish connections between asymptotic functions and properties of solutions to important problems in wireless networks. We start by introducing a class of self-mappings (called asymptotic mappings) constructed with asymptotic functions, and we show that spectral properties of these mappings explain the behavior of solutions to some max–min utility optimization problems. For example, in a common family of max–min utility power control problems, we prove that the optimal utility as a function of the power available to transmitters is approximately linear in the low power regime. However, as we move away from this regime, there exists a transition point, easily computed from the spectral radius of an asymptotic mapping, from which gains in utility become increasingly marginal. From these results we derive analogous properties of the transmit energy efficiency. In this study, we also generalize and unify existing approaches for feasibility analysis in wireless networks. Feasibility problems often reduce to determining the existence of the fixed point of a standard interference mapping, and we show that the spectral radius of an asymptotic mapping provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of such a fixed point. We further present a result that determines whether the fixed point satisfies a constraint given in terms of a monotone norm.

This study investigates the interplay between load and power in load coupled interference networks. In more detail, the first objective of this study is to derive a positive concave mapping having as its fixed point the power allocation inducing a desired network load. Knowledge of this mapping is important for many theoretical and practical reasons. First, it opens up the possibility of applying many existing algorithms to compute the power inducing a desired load, which is an estimation problem typically used to obtain energy efficient network configurations. With the results in this study, systems designers can now select an algorithm based on practical considerations such as the computational complexity, memory requirements, and convergence speed. In particular, we show that algorithms based on simple fixed point iterations already have many advantages over the previously only known method for the power estimation problem. Second, knowledge of specific properties of the mapping, such as concavity, enables us to use standard tools in convex analysis to analyze the network, and it may also give rise to novel optimization tools for self-organizing networks. The second main objective of this study is the development of a truly distributed algorithm for power estimation in real networks. This algorithm uses only information that is readily available at base stations, and it does not require any additional signaling overhead. These two characteristics make the proposed algorithm especially useful in ultra-dense wireless networks, one of the main visions for 5G networks.

We propose an adaptive scheme for distributed learning of nonlinear functions by a network of nodes. The proposed algorithm consists of a local adaptation stage utilizing multiple kernels with projections onto hyperslabs and a diffusion stage to achieve consensus on the estimates over the whole network. Multiple kernels are incorporated to enhance the approximation of functions with several high and low frequency components common in practical scenarios. We provide a thorough convergence analysis of the proposed scheme based on the metric of the Cartesian product of multiple reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. To this end, we introduce a modified consensus matrix considering this specific metric and prove its equivalence to the ordinary consensus matrix. Besides, the use of hyperslabs enables a significant reduction of the computational demand with only a minor loss in the performance. Numerical evaluations with synthetic and real data are conducted showing the efficacy of the proposed algorithm compared to the state of the art schemes., Comment: Double-column 15 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. Signal Processing

The densification and expansion of wireless networks pose new challenges on energy efficiency. With a drastic increase of infrastructure nodes (e.g. ultradense deployment of small cells), the total energy consumption may easily exceed an acceptable level. While most studies focus on the energy radiated by the antennas, the bigger part of the total energy budget is actually consumed by the hardware (e.g., coolers and circuit energy consumption). The ability to shut down infrastructure nodes (or parts of it) or to adapt the transmission strategy according to the traffic will therefore become an important design aspect of energy-efficient wireless ?architectures. Network infrastructure should be ?regarded as a resource that can be occupied or released on demand, and the modeling and optimization of such systems are highly nontrivial problems. In particular, elements of the network infrastructure should be released by taking into account traffic forecasts to avoid losing the required coverage and capacity. However, even if traffic profiles were perfectly known, the determination of the elements to be released is complicated by the potential interference coupling between active elements and the sheer size of the optimization problems in dense networks.

We consider a convex optimization problem for non-hierarchical agent networks where each agent has access to a local or private time-varying function, and the network-wide objective is to find a time-invariant minimizer of the sum of these functions, provided that such a minimizer exists. Problems of this type are common in dynamic systems where the objective function is time-varying because of, for instance, the dependency on measurements that arrive continuously to each agent. A typical outer-loop optimization iteration for optimization problems of this type consists of a local optimization step based on the information provided by neighboring agents, followed by a consensus step to exchange and fuse local estimates of the agents. A great deal of research effort has been directed towards developing and better understanding such algorithms, which find many applications in distinct areas such as cognitive radio networks, distributed acoustic source localization, coordination of unmanned vehicles, and environmental modeling. Contrasting with existing work, which considers either dynamic systems or noisy links (but not both jointly), in this study we devise and analyze a novel distributed online algorithm for dynamic optimization problems in noisy communication environments. The main result of the study proves sufficient conditions for almost sure convergence of the algorithm as the number of iterations tends to infinity. The algorithm is applicable to a wide range of distributed optimization problems with time-varying cost functions and consensus updates corrupted by additive noise. Our results therefore extend previous work to include recently proposed schemes that merge the processes of computation and data transmission over noisy wireless networks for fast and efficient consensus protocols. To give a concrete example of an application, we show how to apply our general technique to the problem of distributed detection with adaptive filters.

This paper presents novel methods for computing fixed points of positive concave mappings and for characterizing the existence of fixed points. These methods are particularly important in planning and optimization tasks in wireless networks. For example, previous studies have shown that the feasibility of a network design can be quickly evaluated by computing the fixed point of a concave mapping that is constructed based on many environmental and network control parameters such as the position of base stations, channel conditions, and antenna tilts. To address this and more general problems, given a positive concave mapping, we show two alternative but equivalent ways to construct a matrix that is guaranteed to have spectral radius strictly smaller than one if the mapping has a fixed point. This matrix is then used to build a new mapping that preserves the fixed point of the original positive concave mapping. We show that the standard fixed point iterations using the new mapping converges faster than the standard iterations applied to the original concave mapping. As exemplary applications of the proposed methods, we consider the problems of power and load estimation in networks based on the orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) technology.

The service provided by mobile networks operated today is not adapted to spatio-temporal fluctuations in traffic demand, although such fluctuations offer opportunities for energy savings. In particular, significant gains in energy efficiency are realizable by disengaging temporarily redundant hardware components of base stations. We therefore propose a novel optimization framework that considers both the load-dependent energy radiated by the antennas and the remaining forms of energy needed for operating the base stations. The objective is to reduce the energy consumption of mobile networks, while ensuring that the data rate requirements of the users are met throughout the coverage area. Building upon sparse optimization techniques, we develop a majorization-minimization algorithm with the ability to identify energy-efficient network configurations. The iterative algorithm is load-aware, has low computational complexity, and can be implemented in an online fashion to exploit load fluctuations on a short time scale. Simulations show that the algorithm can find network configurations with the energy consumption similar to that obtained with global optimization tools, which cannot be applied to real large networks. Although we consider only one currently deployed cellular technology, the optimization framework is general, potentially applicable to a large class of access technologies., Submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications - Green Communications and Networking

We propose a non-hierarchical decentralized algorithm for the asymptotic minimization of possibly time-varying convex functions. In our method, each agent in a network has a private, local (possibly time-varying) cost function, and the objective is to minimize asymptotically the sum of these local functions in every agent (this problem appears in many different applications such as, among others, motion planning, acoustic source localization, and environmental modeling). The algorithm consists of two main steps. First, to improve the estimate of a minimizer, agents apply a particular version of the adaptive projected subgradient method to their local functions. Then the agents exchange and mix their estimates using a communication model based on recent results of consensus algorithms. We show formally the convergence of the resulting scheme, which reproduces as particular cases many existing methods such as gossip consensus algorithms and recent decentralized adaptive s ubgradient methods (which themselves include as particular cases many distributed adaptive filtering algorithms). To illustrate two possible applications, we consider the problems of acoustic source localization and environmental modeling via network gossiping with mobile agents.

In many distributed systems, the objective is to reach agreement on values acquired by the nodes in a network. A common approach to solve such problems is the iterative, weighted linear combination of those values to which each node has access. Methods to compute appropriate weights have been extensively studied, but the resulting iterative algorithms still require many iterations to provide a fairly good estimate of the consensus value. In this study we show that a good estimate of the consensus value can be obtained with few iterations of conventional consensus algorithms by filtering the output of each node with set-theoretic adaptive filters. We use the adaptive projected subgradient method to derive a set-theoretic filter requiring only local information available to each node and being robust to topology changes and erroneous information about the network. Numerical simulations show the good performance of the proposed method.

This paper proposes a novel linear estimator named stochastic MV-PURE estimator, developed for the stochastic linear model, and designed to provide improved performance over the linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) Wiener estimator in cases prevailing in practical, real-world settings, where at least some of the second-order statistics of the random vectors under consideration are only imperfectly known. The proposed estimator shares its main mathematical idea and terminology with the recently introduced minimum-variance pseudo-unbiased reduced-rank estimator (MV-PURE), developed for the linear regression model. The proposed stochastic MV-PURE estimator minimizes the mean square error (MSE) of its estimates subject to rank constraint and inducing minimum distortion to the target random vector. Therefore, the stochastic MV-PURE combines the techniques of the reduced rank Wiener filter (named in this paper RR-MMSE) and the distortionless-constrained estimator (named in this paper C-MMSE), in order to achieve greater robustness against noise or model errors than RR-MMSE and C-MMSE. Furthermore, to ensure that the stochastic MV-PURE estimator combines the reduced-rank and minimum-distortion approaches in the MSE-optimal way, we propose a rank selection criterion which minimizes the MSE of the estimates obtained by the stochastic MV-PURE. As a numerical example, we employ the stochastic MV-PURE, RR-MMSE, C-MMSE, and MMSE estimators as linear receivers in a MIMO wireless communication system. This example is chosen as a typical signal processing scenario, where the statistical information on the data, on which the estimates are built, is only imperfectly known. We verify that the stochastic MV-PURE achieves the lowest MSE and symbol error rate (SER) in such settings by employing the proposed rank selection criterion.

One of the main issues of the orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation is the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitted signal, which adversely affects the complexity of power amplifiers. In this paper, we consider transmitters that reduce the PAPR by slightly disturbing the symbols in carriers used to transmit information and by sending dummy symbols-i.e., symbols not conveying information-in unused carriers. The optimal choice of the data and dummy symbols is determined by the solution of a convex optimization problem. To reduce the PAPR with low complexity, we apply a modified version of the adaptive projected subgradient method to a sequence of convex cost functions closely related to the original optimization problem. The resulting algorithm achieves near-optimal PAPR in practical scenarios, generalizes existing algorithms based on Polyak's method, and can easily handle multiple constraints.

This paper introduces adaptive filters that are effective to suppress multiple access interference (MAI) in orthogonal space-time block coded/ multiple-input multiple-output (OSTBC-MIMO) systems. We define an optimal linear filter that minimizes the mean-square error between the filter output and a scaled version of the desired output under a constraint defined by the available channel state information (CSI). The adaptive filters refine a given estimate of the optimal filter by suppressing a sequence of closed convex functions with the adaptive projected subgradient method (APSM) at each iteration. To provide robustness against imperfect CSI, the adaptive filters use not only the available CSI but also estimates of previously transmitted symbols, which usually belong to a small finite set in digital communication systems. The resulting algorithms employ computationally efficient projections onto hyperplanes or hyperslabs and do not require any matrix inversion. An efficient recursive scheme based on such an algorithm is also presented. Convergence analysis and simulation results show the excellent performance of the proposed schemes.

This paper presents two novel blind set-theoretic adaptive filtering algorithms for suppressing "Multiple Access Interference (MAI)," which is one of the central burdens in DS/CDMA systems. We naturally formulate the problem of MAI suppression as an asymptotic minimization of a sequence of cost functions under some linear constraint defined by the desired user's signature. The proposed algorithms embed the constraint into the direction of update, and thus the adaptive filter moves toward the optimal filter without stepping away from the constraint set. In addition, using parallel processors, the proposed algorithms attain excellent performance with linear computational complexity. Geometric interpretation clarifies an advantage of the proposed methods over existing methods. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithms achieve (i) much higher speed of convergence with rather better bit error rate performance than other blind methods and (ii) much higher speed of convergence than the non-blind NLMS algorithm (indeed, the speed of convergence of the proposed algorithms is comparable to the non-blind RLS algorithm).

We present an algorithm that minimizes asymptotically a sequence of nonnegative convex functions over diffusion networks. In the proposed algorithm, at each iteration the nodes in the network have only partial information of the cost function, but they are able to achieve consensus on a possible minimizer asymptotically. To account for possible node failures, position changes, and/or reachability problems (because of moving obstacles, jammers, etc.), the algorithm can cope with changing network topologies and cost functions, a desirable feature in online algorithms where information arrives sequentially. Many projection-based algorithms can be straightforwardly extended to (probabilistic) diffusion networks with the proposed scheme. The system identification problem in distributed networks is given as one example of a possible application.

The adaptive projected subgradient method offers a unified mathematical perspective for the adaptive (set-membership/set-theoretic) filtering schemes. In this paper, we introduce an overview of its recent theoretical advances and successful applications to robust signal processing problems including the stereo acoustic echo canceling, the MAI suppression in DS/CDMA receivers, and the robust adaptive beamforming with array antenna systems.