Big Data Analytics for Large Scale Wireless Networks: Challenges and Opportunities
Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)（香港科技大学）；Norwegian University of Science & Technology（挪威科技大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Lulea University of Technology（吕勒奥理工大学）
Hong-Ning Dai, Raymond Chi-Wing Wong, Hao Wang, Zibin Zheng, Athanasios V. Vasilakos
The wide proliferation of various wireless communication systems and wireless devices has led to the arrival of big data era in large scale wireless networks. Big data of large scale wireless networks has the key features of wide variety, high volume, real-time velocity and huge value leading to the unique research challenges that are different from existing computing systems. In this paper, we present a survey of the state-of-art big data analytics (BDA) approaches for large scale wireless networks. In particular, we categorize the life cycle of BDA into four consecutive stages: Data Acquisition, Data Preprocessing, Data Storage and Data Analytics. We then present a detailed survey of the technical solutions to the challenges in BDA for large scale wireless networks according to each stage in the life cycle of BDA. Moreover, we discuss the open research issues and outline the future directions in this promising area.
With the major wireless service providers planning to start deployment of 4G wireless networks by mid 2010, research and industry communities are racing against time to find solutions for some of the prominent still open issues in 4G networks. The growing interest in 4G networks is driven by the set of new services will be made available for the first time such as accessing the Internet anytime from anywhere, global roaming, and wider support for multimedia applications. In this paper describe some of the key opportunities will be made available by 4G networks, present key challenges and point…
Wireless communication systems that include unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) promise to provide cost-effective wireless connectivity for devices without infrastructure coverage. Compared to terrestrial communications or those based on high-altitude platforms (HAPs), on-demand wireless systems with low-altitude UAVs are in general faster to deploy, more flexibly re-configured, and are likely to have better communication channels due to the presence of short-range line-of-sight (LoS) links. However, the utilization of highly mobile and energy-constrained UAVs for wireless communications also intr…
The rapidly growing wave of wireless data service is pushing against the boundary of our communication network's processing power. The pervasive and exponentially increasing data traffic present imminent challenges to all the aspects of the wireless system design, such as spectrum efficiency, computing capabilities and fronthaul/backhaul link capacity. In this article, we discuss the challenges and opportunities in the design of scalable wireless systems to embrace such a "bigdata" era. On one hand, we review the state-of-the-art networking architectures and signal processing techniques adapta…
The performance of wireless communication is fundamentally constrained by the limited battery life of wireless devices, whose operations are frequently disrupted due to the need of manual battery replacement/recharging. The recent advance in radio frequency (RF) enabled wireless energy transfer (WET) technology provides an attractive solution named wireless powered communication (WPC), where the wireless devices are powered by dedicated wireless power transmitters to provide continuous and stable microwave energy over the air. As a key enabling technology for truly perpetual communications, WP…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to overcome the deployment constraint of Internet of Things (IoT) in remote or rural area. Wirelessly powered communications (WPC) can address the battery limitation of IoT devices through transferring wireless power to IoT devices. The integration of UAVs and WPC, namely UAV-enabled Wireless Powering IoT (Ue-WPIoT) can greatly extend the IoT applications from cities to remote or rural areas. In this article, we present a state-of-the-art overview of Ue-WPIoT by first illustrating the working flow of Ue-WPIoT and discussing the challenges. We …
The requirements in terms of service quality such as data rate, latency, power consumption, number of connectivity of future fifth-generation (5G) communication is very high. Moreover, in Internet of Things (IoT) requires massive connectivity. Optical wireless communication (OWC) technologies such as visible light communication, light fidelity, optical camera communication, and free space optical communication can effectively serve for the successful deployment of 5G and IoT. This paper clearly presents the contributions of OWC networks for 5G and IoT solutions.
Future wireless services must be focused on improving the quality of life by enabling various applications, such as extended reality, brain-computer interaction, and healthcare. These applications have diverse performance requirements (e.g., user-defined quality of experience metrics, latency, and reliability) that are challenging to be fulfilled by existing wireless systems. To meet the diverse requirements of the emerging applications, the concept of a digital twin has been recently proposed. A digital twin uses a virtual representation along with security-related technologies (e.g., blockch…
A wireless sensor/actuator network (WSAN) is a group of sensors and actuators that are geographically distributed and interconnected by wireless networks. Sensors gather information about the state of physical world. Actuators react to this information by performing appropriate actions. WSANs thus enable cyber systems to monitor and manipulate the behavior of the physical world. WSANs are growing at a tremendous pace, just like the exploding evolution of Internet. Supporting quality of service (QoS) will be of critical importance for pervasive WSANs that serve as the network infrastructure of …
With the introduction of new technologies such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), High Altitude Platform Station (HAPS), Millimeter Wave (mmWave) frequencies, Massive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (mMIMO), and beamforming, wireless backhaul is expected to be an integral part of the 5G networks. While this concept is nothing new, it was shortcoming in terms of performance compared to the fiber backhauling. However, with these new technologies, fiber is no longer the foremost technology for backhauling. With the projected densification of networks, wireless backhaul has become mandatory to use. …
RF-based wireless power transfer networks (WPTNs) are deployed to transfer power to embedded devices over the air via RF waves. Up until now, a considerable amount of effort has been devoted by researchers to design WPTNs that maximize several objectives such as harvested power, energy outage and charging delay. However, inherent security and safety issues are generally overlooked and these need to be solved if WPTNs are to be become widespread. This article focuses on safety and security problems related WPTNs and highlight their cruciality in terms of efficient and dependable operation of RF…
A plethora of demanding services and use cases mandate a revolutionary shift in the management of future wireless network resources. Indeed, when tight quality of service demands of applications are combined with increased complexity of the network, legacy network management routines will become unfeasible in 6G. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a fundamental enabler to orchestrate the network resources from bottom to top. AI-enabled radio access and AI-enabled core will open up new opportunities for automated configuration of 6G. On the other hand, there are many challenges in AI-e…
Southeast University（东南大学）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院上海微系统与信息技术研究所）
The standardization process of the fifth generation (5G) wireless communications has recently been accelerated and the first commercial 5G services would be provided as early as in 2018. The increasing of enormous smartphones, new complex scenarios, large frequency bands, massive antenna elements, and dense small cells will generate big datasets and bring 5G communications to the era of big data. This paper investigates various applications of big data analytics, especially machine learning algorithms in wireless communications and channel modeling. We propose a big data and machine learning e…
Node forgery or impersonation, in which legitimate cryptographic credentials are captured by an adversary, constitutes one major security threat facing wireless networks. The fact that mobile devices are prone to be compromised and reverse engineered significantly increases the risk of such attacks in which adversaries can obtain secret keys on trusted nodes and impersonate the legitimate node. One promising approach toward thwarting these attacks is through the extraction of unique fingerprints that can provide a reliable and robust means for device identification. These fingerprints can be e…
Data center networks (DCNs) are essential infrastructures to embrace the era of highly diversified massive amount of data generated by emerging technological applications. In order to store and process such a data deluge, today's DCNs have to deploy enormous length of wires to interconnect a plethora of servers and switches. Unfortunately, wired DCNs with uniform and inflexible link capacities expose several drawbacks such as high cabling cost and complexity, low space utilization, and lack of bandwidth efficiency. Wireless DCNs (WDCNs) have emerged as a promising solution to reduce the time, …
Recently, significant research attention has been devoted to the study of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which are capable of reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment by exploiting the unique properties of metamaterials-based integrated large arrays of inexpensive antennas. Existing research demonstrates that RISs significantly improve the physical layer performance, including the wireless coverage, achievable data rate and energy efficiency. However, the medium access control (MAC) of multiple users accessing an RIS-enabled channel is still in its infancy, while many op…
UAVs are increasingly appearing in swarms or formations to leverage cooperative behavior, forming flying ad hoc networks. These UAV-enabled networks can meet several complex mission requirements and are seen as a potential enabler for many of the emerging use-cases in future communication networks. Such networks, however, are characterized by a highly dynamic and mobile environment with no guarantee of a central network infrastructure which can cause both connectivity and security issues. While wireless mesh networks are envisioned as a solution for such scenarios, these networks come with the…
Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门科技大学）；Norwegian University of Science & Technology（挪威科技大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；King Saud University（沙特国王大学）
The recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) have promoted the evolution of conventional computer-aided manufacturing industry to smart data-driven manufacturing. Data analytics in massive manufacturing data can extract huge business values while can also result in research challenges due to the heterogeneous data types, enormous volume and real-time velocity of manufacturing data. This paper provides an overview on big data analytics in manufacturing Internet of Things (MIoT). This paper first starts with a discussion on necessities and challenges of big data analytic…
Sensors are present in various forms all around the world such as mobile phones, surveillance cameras, smart televisions, intelligent refrigerators and blood pressure monitors. Usually, most of the sensors are a part of some other system with similar sensors that compose a network. One of such networks is composed of millions of sensors connect to the Internet which is called Internet of things (IoT). With the advances in wireless communication technologies, multimedia sensors and their networks are expected to be major components in IoT. Many studies have already been done on wireless multime…
Recently the topic of how to effectively offload cellular traffic onto device-to-device (D2D) sharing among users in proximity has been gaining more and more attention of global researchers and engineers. Users utilize wireless short-range D2D communications for sharing contents locally, due to not only the rapid sharing experience and free cost, but also high accuracy on deliveries of interesting and popular contents, as well as strong social impacts among friends. Nevertheless, the existing related studies are mostly confined to small-scale datasets, limited dimensions of user features, or u…
An important issue in heterogeneous wireless networks is how to optimally utilize various radio resources. While many methods have been proposed for managing radio resources in each network, these methods are not suitable for heterogeneous wireless networks. In this study, a new management method is proposed which provides acceptable service quality and roaming rate, reduces the cost of the service, and utilizes big data technology for its operation. In our proposed scheme, by considering various parameters such as the type of the service, the information related to the location of the user, t…
We have witnessed an exponential growth in commercial data services, which has lead to the 'big data era'. Machine learning, as one of the most promising artificial intelligence tools of analyzing the deluge of data, has been invoked in many research areas both in academia and industry. The aim of this article is twin-fold. Firstly, we briefly review big data analysis and machine learning, along with their potential applications in next-generation wireless networks. The second goal is to invoke big data analysis to predict the requirements of mobile users and to exploit it for improving the pe…
A Comprehensive Survey on Spectrum Sharing Techniques for 5G/B5G Intelligent Wireless Networks: Opportunities, Challenges and Future Research Directions
With the increasing popularity of user equipments (UEs), the corresponding UEs' generating big data (UGBD) is also growing substantially, which makes both UEs and current network structures struggling in processing those data and applications. This paper proposes a Near-Far Computing Enhanced C-RAN (NFC-RAN) architecture, which can better process big data and its corresponding applications. NFC-RAN is composed of near edge computing (NEC) and far edge computing (FEC) units. NEC is located in remote radio head (RRH), which can fast respond to delay sensitive tasks from the UEs, while FEC sits n…
Currently, the world is witnessing a mounting avalanche of data due to the increasing number of mobile network subscribers, Internet websites, and online services. This trend is continuing to develop in a quick and diverse manner in the form of big data. Big data analytics can process large amounts of raw data and extract useful, smaller-sized information, which can be used by different parties to make reliable decisions. In this paper, we conduct a survey on the role that big data analytics can play in the design of data communication networks. Integrating the latest advances that employ big …
Bandit-style algorithms have been studied extensively in stochastic and adversarial settings. Such algorithms have been shown to be useful in multiplayer settings, e.g. to solve the wireless network selection problem, which can be formulated as an adversarial bandit problem. A leading bandit algorithm for the adversarial setting is EXP3. However, network behavior is often repetitive, where user density and network behavior follow regular patterns. Bandit algorithms, like EXP3, fail to provide good guarantees for periodic behaviors. A major reason is that these algorithms compete against fixed-…
The explosion of 5G networks and the Internet of Things will result in an exceptionally crowded RF environment, where techniques such as spectrum sharing and dynamic spectrum access will become essential components of the wireless communication process. In this vision, wireless devices must be able to (i) learn to autonomously extract knowledge from the spectrum on-the-fly; and (ii) react in real time to the inferred spectrum knowledge by appropriately changing communication parameters, including frequency band, symbol modulation, coding rate, among others. Traditional CPU-based machine learni…
The Internet of Things helps to have every individual interconnected with their surroundings and to interact with them through smart devices. In recent years, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology has become very popular in smart infrastructures, the medical field, the retail industry, and many more areas due to its availability in a plethora of wireless devices. BLE is widely used in IoT devices, such as smartphones, smart watches, and BLE beacons. Beacons are small, low-cost, and low-power wireless transmitters that bring attention to their location by broadcasting a signal with a unique ide…
Integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks has the potential of connecting the unconnected and enhancing the user experience for the already-connected, with technological and societal implications of the greatest long-term significance. A convergence of ground, air, and space wireless communications also represents a formidable endeavor for the mobile and satellite communications industries alike, as it entails defining and intelligently orchestrating a new 3D wireless network architecture. In this article, we present the key opportunities and challenges arising from this (r)evolutio…
In the last years, the advancements in signal processing and integrated circuits technology allowed several research groups to develop working prototypes of in-band full-duplex wireless systems. The introduction of such a revolutionary concept is promising in terms of increasing network performance, but at the same time poses several new challenges, especially at the MAC layer. Consequently, innovative channel access strategies are needed to exploit the opportunities provided by full-duplex while dealing with the increased complexity derived from its adoption. In this direction, this paper pro…
Multi-functional wireless networks are rapidly evolving and aspire to become a promising attribute of the upcoming 6G networks. Enabling multiple simultaneous networking functions with a single radio fosters the development of more integrated and simpler equipment, overcoming design and technology barriers inherited from radio systems of the past. We are seeing numerous trends exploiting these features in newly designed radios, such as those operating on the mmWave band. In this article, however, we carefully analyze the challenges and opportunities for multi-functional wireless networks in UH…
Unattended Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are Wireless Sensor Networks characterized by sporadic sink presence and operation in hostile settings. The absence of the sink for period of time, prevents sensor nodes to offload data in real time and offer greatly increased opportunities for attacks resulting in erasure, modification, or disclosure of sensor-collected data. In this paper, we focus on UWSNs where sensor nodes collect and store data locally and try to upload all the information once the sink becomes available. One of the most relevant issues pertaining UWSNs is to guarantee a certai…
Wireless multi-hop networks, in various forms and under various names, are being increasingly used in military and civilian applications. Studying connectivity and capacity of these networks is an important problem. The scaling behavior of connectivity and capacity when the network becomes sufficiently large is of particular interest. In this position paper, we briefly overview recent development and discuss research challenges and opportunities in the area, with a focus on the network connectivity.
University of Maryland, Baltimore County（马里兰大学巴尔的摩县分校）
Due to the advancement in technologies, the next-generation wireless network will be very diverse, complicated, and according to the changed demands of the consumers. The current network operator methodologies and approaches are traditional and cannot help the next generation networks to utilize their resources most appropriately. The limited capability of the traditional tools will not allow the network providers to fulfill the demands of the network's subscribers in the future. Therefore, this paper will focus on machine learning, automation, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics f…
Just recently, the concept of augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) over wireless has taken the entire 5G ecosystem by storm spurring an unprecedented interest from both academia, industry and others. Yet, the success of an immersive VR experience hinges on solving a plethora of grand challenges cutting across multiple disciplines. This article underscores the importance of VR technology as a disruptive use case of 5G (and beyond) harnessing the latest development of storage/memory, fog/edge computing, computer vision, artificial intelligence and others. In particular, the main requirements of…
Network coding is known as a promising approach to improve wireless network performance. How to discover the coding opportunity in relay nodes is really important for it. There are more coding chances, there are more times it can improve network throughput by network coding operation. In this paper, an extended network coding opportunity discovery scheme (ExCODE) is proposed, which is realized by appending the current node ID and all its 1-hop neighbors' IDs to the packet. ExCODE enables the next hop relay node to know which nodes else have already overheard the packet, so it can discover the …
Usage of mobile wireless Internet has grown very fast in recent years. This radical change in availability of Internet has led to communication of big amount of data over mobile networks and consequently new challenges and opportunities for modeling of mobile Internet characteristics. While the traditional approach toward network modeling suggests finding a generic traffic model for the whole network, in this paper, we show that this approach does not capture all the dynamics of big mobile networks and does not provide enough accuracy. Our case study based on a big dataset including billions o…
This article emphasizes the great potential of big data processing for advanced user- and situation-oriented, so context-aware resource utilization in future wireless networks. In particular, we consider the application of dedicated, detailed, and rich-in-content maps and records called Radio Service Maps, (RSM) for unlocking the spectrum opportunities in 6G networks. Due to the characteristics of 5G, in the future, there will be a need for high convergence of various types of wireless networks, such as cellular and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, which are steadily growing and conseque…
High-performance wireless communication is crucial in digital transformation of industrial systems which is driven by Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet initiatives. Among the candidate industrial wireless technologies, 5G (cellular/mobile) holds significant potential. Operation of private (non-public) 5G networks in industrial environments is promising to fully unleash this potential. This article provides a technical overview of private 5G networks. It introduces the concept and functional architecture of private 5G while highlighting the key benefits and industrial use-cases. It explo…
Intermittently Connected Delay-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks (ICDT-WSNs), a branch of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), have features of WSNs and the intermittent connectivity of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs). The applications of ICDT-WSNs are increasing in recent years, however, the communication protocols suitable for this category of networks often fall short. Most of the existing communication protocols are designed for either WSNs or DTNs and tend to be inadequate for direct use in ICDT-WSNs. This survey summarizes characteristics of ICDT-WSNs and their communication protocol requirem…
Recently, mesh networking and blockchain are two of the hottest technologies in the telecommunications industry. Combining both can reformulate internet access and make connecting to the Internet not only easy, but affordable too. Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) is a blockchain framework implementation and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation. We evaluate HLF in a real production mesh network and in the laboratory, quantify its performance, bottlenecks and limitations of the current implementation. We identify the opportunities for improvement to serve the needs of wireless …
The next 5 th generation (5G) and above ultra-high speed, ultra-low latency, and extremely high reliable communication systems will consist of heterogeneous networks. These heterogeneous networks will consist not only radio frequency (RF) based systems but also optical wireless based systems. Hybrid architectures among different networks is an excellent approach for achieving the required level of service quality. In this paper, we provide the opportunities bring by hybrid systems considering RF as well as optical wireless based communication technologies. We also discuss about the key researc…
Recent advances in programmable metasurfaces, also dubbed as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), are envisioned to offer a paradigm shift from uncontrollable to fully tunable and customizable wireless propagation environments, enabling a plethora of new applications and technological trends. Therefore, in view of this cutting edge technological concept, we first review the architecture and electromagnetic waves manipulation functionalities of RISs. We then detail some of the recent advancements that have been made towards realizing these programmable functionalities in wireless communi…
It has been well established that wireless network coding can significantly improve the efficiency of multi-hop wireless networks. However, in a stochastic environment some of the packets might not have coding pairs, which limits the number of available coding opportunities. In this context, an important decision is whether to delay packet transmission in hope that a coding pair will be available in the future or transmit a packet without coding. The paper addresses this problem by formulating a stochastic dynamic program whose objective is to minimize the long-run average cost per unit time i…
Extreme events and disasters resulting from climate change or other ecological factors are difficult to predict and manage. Current limitations of state-of-the-art approaches to disaster prediction and management could be addressed by adopting new unorthodox risk assessment and management strategies. The next generation Internet of Things (IoT), Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), 5G wireless communication, and big data analytics technologies are the key enablers for future effective disaster management infrastructures. In this chapter, we commissioned a survey on emerging wireless communication …
This paper retraces the historical development of wireless LAN technology in the context of the pursuit of ever higher data rate, describes the significant technical breakthroughs that are now occurring, and speculates on future directions that the technology may take over the remainder of the decade. The challenges that these developments have created for low power operation are considered, as well as some of the opportunities that are presented to mitigate them. The importance of MIMO as an emerging technology for 802.11 is specifically highlighted, both in terms of the significant increase …
We are interested in unicast traffic over wireless networks that employ constructive inter-session network coding, including single-hop and multi-hop schemes. In this setting, TCP flows do not fully exploit the network coding opportunities due to their bursty behavior and due to the fact that TCP is agnostic to the underlying network coding. In order to improve the performance of TCP flows over coded wireless networks, we take the following steps. First, we formulate the problem as network utility maximization and we present a distributed solution. Second, mimicking the structure of the optima…
In recent years, the radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting technique is considered as a favorable alternative to supply power for the next-generation wireless sensor networks. Due to the features of energy self-sustainability and long lifetime, the energy harvesting sensor network (RF-EHSN) becomes a promising solution to provide smart healthcare services. Nowadays, many energy harvesting based applications have been developed for monitoring the health status of human beings; how to benefit animals, however, has not yet drawn people's attention. This article explores the potential of applying…
