This paper proposes an optimized sensing based channel access framework for the LTE cognitive femto-cells, with an objective of maximizing the femto-cells downlink throughput. Cognitive femto-cells opportunistically transmit on the macro-cell channels when they are free of use. Those free channels are located by means of spectrum sensing using energy detection. Moreover, periodic sensing is adopted to detect any changes of the sensing outcomes. The maximum attainable femto-cell downlink throughput varies with the macro-cell channel occupancy statistics. Therefore, the LTE macro-cell occupancy is empirically modeled using exponential distributions mixture. The LTE cognitive femto-cell downlink throughput is maximized by compromising the transmission efficiency, the explored spectrum opportunities and the interference from the macro-cell. An analytical solution for the optimal periodic sensing interval that maximizes the throughput is found and verified by simulations. The obtained results show that there is indeed a single periodic sensing interval value that maximizes the LTE cognitive femto-cell downlink throughput. At the peak of the macro-cell traffic, our framework increases the femto-cell throughput by around 15% compared to the senseless case. The impact of the available number of channels for opportunistic access is studied and no significant impact is found for more than three channels.
It is known that phase noise (PN) can cause link performance to degrade severely in orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, such as IEEE 802.11, 3GPP LTE and 5G. As opposed to prior PN mitigation schemes that assume perfect channel information and/or abundant reference symbols (e.g., in 802.11), the proposed PN compensation technique applies to LTE and 5G downlink with a limited number of reference symbols. Specifically, in this work, we propose an efficient PN mitigation algorithm where the PN statistics are used to obtain more accurate channel estimates. Based on LTE downl…
Uplink-downlink decoupling in which users can be associated to different base stations in the uplink and downlink of heterogeneous small cell networks (SCNs) has attracted significant attention recently. However, most existing works focus on simple association mechanisms in LTE SCNs that operate only in the licensed band. In contrast, in this paper, the problem of resource allocation with uplink-downlink decoupling is studied for an SCN that incorporates LTE in the unlicensed band (LTE-U). Here, the users can access both licensed and unlicensed bands while being associated to different base st…
This paper is concerned with the performance improvement of PAPR reduction of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal using amplitude clipping & filtering based design. Note that OFDM is one of the well adept multi-carrier multiplexing transmission scheme which has been implemented in long term evolution (LTE) downlink. Nonetheless peak to average power ratio (PAPR) is the more rattling problem with OFDM, consequently in this paper a reduction procedure of the PAPR by using amplitude clipping and filtering is proposed. Here we used IIR bandpass elliptic filter after amplitude …
Heterogeneous networks are a flexible deployment model that rely on low power nodes to improve the user broadband experience in a cost effective manner. Femtocells are an integral part of heterogeneous networks, whose main purpose is to improve the indoor capacity. When restricting access to home users, femtocells cause a substantial interference problem that cannot be mitigated through coordination with the macrocell base station. In this paper, we analyze multiple antenna communication on the downlink of a macrocell network, with femtocell overlay. We evaluate the feasibility of limited feed…
Modern cellular networks in traditional frequency bands are notoriously interference-limited especially in urban areas, where base stations are deployed in close proximity to one another. The latest releases of Long Term Evolution (LTE) incorporate features for coordinating downlink transmissions as an efficient means of managing interference. Recent field trial results and theoretical studies of the performance of joint transmission (JT) coordinated multi-point (CoMP) schemes revealed, however, that their gains are not as high as initially expected, despite the large coordination overhead. Th…
In this paper, the problem of channel estimation for LTE Downlink system in the environment of high mobility presenting non-Gaussian impulse noise interfering with reference signals is faced. The estimation of the frequency selective time varying multipath fading channel is performed by using a channel estimator based on a nonlinear complex Support Vector Machine Regression (SVR) which is applied to Long Term Evolution (LTE) downlink. The estimation algorithm makes use of the pilot signals to estimate the total frequency response of the highly selective fading multipath channel. Thus, the algo…
We study a two-tier macrocell/femtocell system where the macrocell base station is equipped with multiple antennas and makes use of multiuser MIMO (spatial multiplexing), and the femtocells are "cognitive". In particular, we assume that the femtocells are aware of the locations of scheduled macrocell users on every time-frequency slot, so that they can make decisions on their transmission opportunities accordingly. Femtocell base stations are also equipped with multiple antennas. We propose a scheme where the macrocell downlink (macro- DL) is aligned with the femtocells uplink (femto-UL) and, …
The Long Term Evolution (LTE) as a mobile broadband technology supports a wide domain of communication services with different requirements. Therefore, scheduling of all flows from various applications in overload states in which the requested amount of bandwidth exceeds the limited available spectrum resources is a challenging issue. Accordingly, in this paper, a greedy algorithm is presented to evaluate user candidates which are waiting for scheduling and select an optimal set of the users to maximize system performance, without exceeding available bandwidth capacity. The greedy-knapsack alg…
The heterogeneity in cellular networks that comprise multiple base stations types imposes new challenges in network planning and deployment. The Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques, such as dynamic sharing of the available resources and advanced user association strategies determine the overall network capacity and the network/spectrum efficiency. This paper evaluates the downlink performance of a two-tier heterogeneous LTE network (consisting of macro and femto tiers) in terms of rate distribution, i.e. the percentage of users that achieve certain rate in the system. The paper specific…
In this paper, we investigate an application of two different beamforming techniques and propose a novel downlink power minimization scheme for a two-tier heterogeneous network (HetNet) model. In this context, we employ time reversal (TR) technique to a femtocell base station (FBS) whereas we assume that a macrocell base station (MBS) uses a zero-forcing-based algorithm and the communication channels are subject to frequency selective fading. Additionally, HetNet's backhaul connection is unable to support a sufficient throughput for signaling information exchange between two tiers. Given the c…
Heterogeneous networks (het-nets) - comprising of conventional macrocell base stations overlaid with femtocells, picocells and wireless relays - offer cellular operators burgeoning traffic demands through cell-splitting gains obtained by bringing users closer to their access points. However, the often random and unplanned location of these access points can cause severe near-far problems, typically solved by coordinating base-station transmissions to minimize interference. Towards this direction, the 3rd generation partnership project Long Term Evolution-Advanced (3GPP-LTE or Rel-10) standard …
With the explosive growth of smart devices and mobile data traffic, limited fronthaul capacity has become a notable bottleneck of green communication access networks, such as cloud radio access networks(C-RANs). In this paper, we proposed a joint user association and downlink beamforming scheme for green C-RANs to minimize the network power consumption with the limited fronthaul links. We first formulate the design problem as a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP), and then transformed the MINLP problem into a mixed integer second-order cone program (MI-SOCP) which is a convex program w…
Cell association in cellular networks has traditionally been based on the downlink received signal power only, despite the fact that up and downlink transmission powers and interference levels differed significantly. This approach was adequate in homogeneous networks with macro base stations all having similar transmission power levels. However, with the growth of heterogeneous networks where there is a big disparity in the transmit power of the different base station types, this approach is highly inefficient. In this paper, we study the notion of Downlink and Uplink Decoupling (DUDe) where t…
LTE random access procedure performs satisfactorily in case of asynchronous, uncorrelated traffic arrivals. However, when the arrivals are correlated and arrive synchronously, the performance of the random access channel (RACH) is drastically reduced, causing a large number of devices to experience outage. In this work we propose a LTE RACH scheme tailored for delay-sensitive M2M services with synchronous traffic arrivals. The key idea is, upon detection of a RACH overload, to apply a collision resolution algorithm based on splitting trees. The solution is implemented on top of the existing LT…
The Full Dimension-MIMO (FD-MIMO) technology is capable of achieving huge improvements in network throughput with simultaneous connectivity of a large number of mobile wireless devices, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the Internet of Things (IoT). In FD-MIMO, with a large number of antennae at the base station and the ability to perform beamforming, the capacity of the physical downlink shared channel (PDSCH) has increased a lot. However, the current specifications of the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) does not allow the base station to perform beamforming techniques for the physical …
The heterogeneity in cellular networks that comprise multiple base stations types imposes new challenges in network planning and deployment of future generation of cellular networks. The Radio Resource Management (RRM) techniques, such as dynamic sharing of the available resources and advanced user association strategies, determine the overall network capacity and efficiency. This paper evaluates the downlink performance of a two tier heterogeneous network (consisting of macro and femto tiers) in terms of rate distribution, i.e. the percentage of users that achieve certain rate in the system. …
Wireless cellular networks evolve towards a heterogeneous infrastructure, featuring multiple types of Base Stations (BSs), such as Femto BSs (FBSs) and Macro BSs (MBSs). A wireless device observes multiple points (BSs) through which it can access the infrastructure and it may choose to receive the downlink (DL) traffic from one BS and send uplink (UL) traffic through another BS. Such a situation is referred to as decoupled DL/UL access. Using the framework of stochastic geometry, we derive the association probability for DL/UL. In order to maximize the average received power, as the relative d…
The impact of cognition on the energy efficiency of a downlink cellular system in which multiple relays assist the transmission of the base station is considered. The problem is motivated by the practical importance of relay-assisted solutions in mobile networks, such as LTE-A, in which cooperation among relays holds the promise of greatly improving the energy efficiency of the system. We study the fundamental tradeoff between the power consumption at the base station and the level of cooperation and cognition at the relay nodes. By distributing the same message to multiple relays, the base st…
User scheduling and multiuser multi-antenna (MU-MIMO) transmission are at the core of high rate data-oriented downlink schemes of the next-generation of cellular systems (e.g., LTE-Advanced). Scheduling selects groups of users according to their channels vector directions and SINR levels. However, when scheduling is applied independently in each cell, the inter-cell interference (ICI) power at each user receiver is not known in advance since it changes at each new scheduling slot depending on the scheduling decisions of all interfering base stations. In order to cope with this uncertainty, we …
While LTE is becoming widely rolled out for human-type services, it is also a promising solution for cost-efficient connectivity of the smart grid monitoring equipment. This is a type of machine-to-machine (M2M) traffic that consists mainly of sporadic uplink transmissions. In such a setting, the amount of traffic that can be served in a cell is not constrained by the data capacity, but rather by the signaling constraints in the random access channel and control channel. In this paper we explore these limitations using a detailed simulation of the LTE access reservation protocol (ARP). We find…
In heterogeneous cellular scenarios with macrocells, femtocells or picocells users may suffer from significant co-channel cross-tier interference. To manage this interference 3GPP introduced almost blank subframe (ABSF), a subframe in which the interferer tier is not allowed to transmit data. Vulnerable users thus get a chance to be scheduled in ABSFs with reduced cross-tier interference. We analyze downlink scenarios using stochastic geometry and formulate a condition for the required number of ABSFs based on base station placement statistics and user throughput requirement. The result is a s…
Technologies for mmWave communication are at the forefront of investigations in both industry and academia, as the mmWave band offers the promise of orders of magnitude additional available bandwidths to what has already been allocated to cellular networks. The much larger number of antennas that can be supported in a small footprint at mmWave bands can be leveraged to harvest massive-MIMO type beamforming and spatial multiplexing gains. Similar to LTE systems, two prerequisites for harvesting these benefits are detecting users and acquiring user channel state information (CSI) in the training…
The connectivity of public-safety mobile users (MU) in the co-existence of a public-safety network (PSN), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and LTE-based railway networks (LRN) needs a thorough investigation. UAVs are deployed as mobile base stations (BSs) for cell-edge coverage enhancement for MU. The co-existence of heterogeneous networks gives rise to the issue of co-channel interference due to the utilization of the same frequency band. By considering both sharing and non-sharing of radio access channels (RAC), we analyze co-channel interference in the downlink system of PSN, UAV, and LRN. …
