Smart grid is an energy network that integrates advanced power equipment, communication technology and control technology. It can transmit two-way power and data among all components of the grid at the same time. The existing smart grid communication technologies include power line carrier (PLC) com-munication, industrial Ethernet, passive optical networks and wireless communi-cation, each of which have different advantages. Due to the complex application scenarios, massive sampling points and high transmission reliability require-ments, a single communication method cannot fully meet the communication re-quirements of smart grid, and heterogeneous communication modes are required. In addition, with the development of cellular technology, long term evolution (LTE)-based standards have been identified as a promising technology that can meet the strict requirements of various operations in smart grid. In this paper, we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of PLC and LTE communication, and design a network framework for PLC and LTE communication uplink heteroge-neous communication in smart grid. Then, we propose an uplink scheduling transmission method for sampling data with optimized throughput according to the requirements of system delay and reliability. Then, we use the formula deri-vation to prove the stability and solvability of the scheduling system in theory. Finally, the simulation results show that under the condition of satisfying the de-lay requirement, our proposed framework can optimally allocate the wireless communication resource and maximize the throughput of the uplink transmission system. Keywords: smart grid, heterogeneous communication, optimized throughput.
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has proposed vast exclusions zones between radar and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) systems which are also being considered as geographic separations between radars and 3.5 GHz Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems without investigating any changes induced by the distinct nature of LTE as opposed to WiMAX. This paper performs a detailed system-level analysis of the interference effects from shipborne radar systems into LTE systems. Even though the results reveal impacts of radar interference on LTE systems p…
National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has proposed vast exclusions zones between radar and Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) (WiMAX) systems which are also being considered as geographic separations between radars and 3.5 GHz Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems without investigating any changes induced by the distinct nature of LTE as opposed to WiMAX. This paper performs a detailed system-level analysis of the interference effects from shipborne radar systems into LTE systems. Even though the results reveal impacts of radar interference on LTE s…
Energy, water, health, transportation and emergency services act as backbones for our society. Aiming at high degrees of efficiency, these systems are increasingly automated, depending on communication systems. However, this makes these Critical Infrastructures (CI) prone to cyber attacks, resulting in data leaks, reduced performance or even total system failure. Beyond a survey of existing vulnerabilities, we provide an experimental evaluation of targeted uplink jamming against LTE's air interface. Primarily, our implementations of smart attacks on the LTE Physical Uplink Control Channel (PUC…
This survey paper provides a detailed explanation of Long Term Evolution cellular network packet scheduling algorithms in both downlink and uplink directions. It starts by explaining the difference between Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access that is used in downlink transmission, and Single Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access is used in uplink. Then, it explains the difference between the LTE scheduling process in the donwlink and uplink through explaining the interaction between users and the scheduler. Then, it explains the most commonly used downlink and uplink scheduling a…
Due to high system capacity requirement, 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) is likely to adopt frequency reuse factor 1 at the cost of suffering severe inter-cell interference (ICI). One of combating ICI strategies is network cooperation of resource allocation (RA). For LTE uplink RA, requiring all the subcarriers to be allocated adjacently complicates the RA problem greatly. This paper investigates the joint multi-cell RA problem for LTE uplink. We model the uplink RA and ICI mitigation problem using pure binary-integer programming (BIP), with integrative consideration of all users' channel state…
LTEs uplink (UL) efficiency critically depends on how the interference across different cells is controlled. The unique characteristics of LTEs modulation and UL resource assignment poses considerable challenges in achieving this goal because most LTE deployments have 1:1 frequency re-use, and the uplink interference can vary considerably across successive time slots. In this work, we propose LeAP, a measurement data driven machine learning paradigm for power control to manage up-link interference in LTE. The data driven approach has the inherent advantage that the solution adapts based on net…
The bulk of the research on Long Term Evolution/Long Term Evolution-Advanced packet scheduling is concentrated in the downlink and the uplink is comparatively less explored. In up-link, channel aware scheduling with throughput maximization has been widely studied while considering an infinitely back-logged buffer model, which makes the investigations unrealistic. Therefore, we propose an optimal uplink packet scheduling pro-cedure with realistic traffic sources. Firstly, we advocate a joint channel and buffer aware algorithm, which maximizes the actual transmitted bit-count. Thereafter, we int…
We consider Multi-User MIMO (MU-MIMO) scheduling in the 3GPP LTE-Advanced (3GPP LTE-A) cellular uplink. The 3GPP LTE-A uplink allows for precoded multi-stream (precoded MIMO) transmission from each scheduled user and also allows flexible multi-user (MU) scheduling wherein multiple users can be assigned the same time-frequency resource. However, exploiting these features is made challenging by certain practical constraints that have been imposed in order to maintain a low signaling overhead. We show that while the scheduling problem in the 3GPP LTE-A cellular uplink is NP-hard, it can be formul…
Due to the proliferation of applications for the Internet of Things, an increasing number of machine to machine (M2M) devices are being deployed. In particular, one of the M2M applications, video surveillance, has been widely discussed. Long Term Evolution (LTE), which can provide a high rate of data transmission and wide range of coverage, is a promising standard to serve as an M2M video surveillance system. In this paper, we studied a performance maximization problem in an LTE video surveillance system. Given a set of objects and a set of cameras, each camera has its own performance grade an…
In this paper, we consider resource allocation in the 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) cellular uplink, which will be the most widely deployed next generation cellular uplink. The key features of the 3GPP LTE uplink (UL) are that it is based on a modified form of the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing based multiple access (OFDMA) which enables channel dependent frequency selective scheduling, and that it allows for multi-user (MU) scheduling wherein multiple users can be assigned the same time-frequency resource. In addition to the considerable spectral efficiency improvements that are …
LTE Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a 3GPP defined cellular technology that is designed to enable connectivity to many low-cost and low power/throughput IoT devices running delay-tolerant applications. NB-IoT can coexist within LTE spectrum either in a standalone mode, in-band with LTE or in guard-band of LTE. With NB-IoT designed to operate in very low signal to noise power ratios, the uplink receiver design presents several challenges. In this paper the design and performance of a NB-IoT uplink receiver is studied in detail. First, receiver design for NB-IoT uplink channels, with c…
In cellular massive Machine-Type Communications (MTC), a device can transmit directly to the base station (BS) or through an aggregator (intermediate node). While direct device-BS communication has recently been in the focus of 5G/3GPP research and standardization efforts, the use of aggregators remains a less explored topic. In this paper we analyze the deployment scenarios in which aggregators can perform cellular access on behalf of multiple MTC devices. We study the effect of packet bundling at the aggregator, which alleviates overhead and resource waste when sending small packets. The agg…
Energy-aware system design is an important optimization task for static and mobile Internet of Things (IoT)-based sensor nodes, especially for highly resource-constrained vehicles such as mobile robotic systems. For 4G/5G-based cellular communication systems, the effective transmission power of uplink data transmissions is of crucial importance for the overall system power consumption. Unfortunately, this information is usually hidden within off-the-shelf modems and mobile handsets and can therefore not be exploited for enabling green communication. Moreover, the dynamic transmission power con…
We consider the allocation of spectral and power resources to the mobiles (i.e., user equipment (UE)) in a cell every subframe (1 ms) for the Long Term Evolution (LTE) orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) cellular network. To enable scheduling based on packet delays, we design a novel mechanism for inferring the packet delays approximately from the buffer status reports (BSR) transmitted by the UEs; the BSR reports only contain queue length information. We then consider a constrained optimization problem with a concave objective function - schedulers such as those based on uti…
This paper focuses on an essential task of the enhanced NodeB eNodeB element in LTE architecture, the Radio Resource Manager RRM, which aims to accept or reject requests for connection to the network based on some constraints and ensuring optimal distribution of radio resources between Users Equipments UEs. Its main functionalities include Admission Control AC and Packet Scheduling PS. This paper will center mainly on the PS part of the RRM task, which performs the radio resource allocation in both uplink and downlink directions. Several approaches and algorithms have been proposed in the lite…
Relaying is a promising enhancement to current radio access networks. Relay enhanced LTE-Advanced networks are expected to fulfill the demanding coverage and capacity requirements in a cost-efficient way. However, due to low transmit power, the coverage areas of the relay nodes will be small. Therefore, the performance of relay deployments may be limited by load imbalances. In this study, we present a practical solution for this problem by introducing a bias to cell selection and handover decisions along with a reduction in eNB transmit power. This method results in an extension of the relay c…
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…
Wireless surveillance in cellular networks has become increasingly important, while commercial LTE surveillance cameras are also available nowadays. Nevertheless, most scheduling algorithms in the literature are throughput, fairness, or profit-based approaches, which are not suitable for wireless surveillance. In this paper, therefore, we explore the resource allocation problem for a multi-camera surveillance system in 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) uplink (UL) networks. We minimize the number of allocated resource blocks (RBs) while guaranteeing the coverage requirement for surveillance syste…
Ever since the inception of mobile telephony, the downlink and uplink of cellular networks have been coupled, i.e. mobile terminals have been constrained to associate with the same base station (BS) in both the downlink and uplink directions. New trends in network densification and mobile data usage increase the drawbacks of this constraint, and suggest that it should be revisited. In this paper we identify and explain five key arguments in favor of Downlink/Uplink Decoupling (DUDe) based on a blend of theoretical, experimental, and logical arguments. We then overview the changes needed in cur…
Wi-Fi provides cost-effective data capacity at hotspots in conjunction with broadband cellular networks. The hotspots are required to capture a large number of users and provide high data rates. Data rates, over the Wi-Fi interface, are influenced by the media access protocol, which loses throughput due to delays and unintended collisions when a large number of users are active. The hotspot range which determines the number of users, that can associate, is limited by the lower power of the client rather than the access point. By diverting the traffic destined to the access point via another ac…
We propose WiPLUS -- a system that enables WiFi to deal with the stealthy invasion of LTE-U into the frequency bands used by WiFi. Using solely MAC layer information extracted passively, during runtime, out of the hardware registers of the WiFi NIC at the WiFi access point, WiPLUS is able to: i) detect interfering LTE-U signals, ii) compute their duty-cycles, and iii) derive the effective medium airtime available for each WiFi link in a WiFi Basic Service Set (BSS). Moreover WiPLUS provides accurate timing information about the detected LTE-U ON and OFF phases enabling advanced interference mi…
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…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are a promising technology for fast, large scale survey operations such as maritime search and rescue (SAR). However, providing reliable communications over long distances remains a challenge. Cellular technology such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) is designed to perform well in the presence of fast-moving clients and highly dynamic channel conditions. Yet, its generic medium access mechanisms make it hard to support low-latency uplink traffic, which is needed for real-time command and control and similar applications. In this paper, we introduce an unmanned aerial…
Device-to-device (D2D) communications as an underlay of a LTE-A (4G) network can reduce the traffic load as well as power consumption in cellular networks by way of utilizing peer-to-peer links for users in proximity of each other. This would enable other cellular users to increment their traffic, and the aggregate traffic for all users can be significantly increased without requiring additional spectrum. However, D2D communications may increase interference to cellular users (CUs) and force CUs to increase their transmit power levels in order to maintain their required quality-of-service (QoS…
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…
A canonical scenario in Machine-Type Communications (MTC) is the one featuring a large number of devices, each of them with sporadic traffic. Hence, the number of served devices in a single LTE cell is not determined by the available aggregate rate, but rather by the limitations of the LTE access reservation protocol. Specifically, the limited number of contention preambles and the limited amount of uplink grants per random access response are crucial to consider when dimensioning LTE networks for MTC. We propose a low-complexity model of LTE's access reservation protocol that encompasses thes…
With exponential increase in the volumes of video traffic in cellular net-works, there is an increasing need for optimizing the quality of video delivery. 4G networks (Long Term Evolution Advanced or LTE A) are being introduced in many countries worldwide, which allow a downlink speed of upto 1 Gbps and uplink of 100 Mbps over a single base station. In this paper, we characterize the performance of LTE A physical layer in terms of transmitted video quality when the channel condi-tions and LTE settings are varied. We test the performance achieved as the channel quality is changed and HARQ featu…
This paper investigates point-to-multipoint (PTM) transmission supporting adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) as well as retransmissions based on incremental redundancy. In contrast to the classical PTM transmission which was introduced by the Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS), the adaptiveness requires user individual feedback channels that allow the receivers to report their radio conditions and send positive or negative acknowledgments (ACK/NACK) for a Layer 1 transport block to the eNodeB. In this work, an adaptive PTM scheme based on feedback from multiple users is presented …
Frequency reuse in cells is one of the strategies that LTE uses to maximize the spectrum efficiency. However, it leads to an interference among the cells, especially at the cell edges where the probability for a cell-edge user to be scheduled on a resource block that is being transmitted by the neighbouring cell is high; consequently, the interference is high. In-order to mitigate Inter-Cell Interference, Inter-Cell Interference Coordination was proposed by the Third Generation Partnership Project 3GPP standards for the LTE network, and later on, the enhanced Inter-Cell Interference Coordinati…
Downlink/Uplink decoupling (DUDe) in LTE net- works has caught the attention of researchers as it provides better uplink SINR and reduced power consumption per device due to decoupled connection of a device with the Macro (in downlink) and a small cell (in uplink). These characteristics of DUDe can be exploited to encourage more D2D communications in the network. This paper first proposes a model to estimate decoupling region within which a device is allowed to perform DUDe. Then, it formulates an equation to calculate the total power saved by devices due to decoupling. Finally, the extra area…
In this paper, we propose a transceiver architecture for full-duplex (FD) eNodeB (eNB) and FD user equipment (UE) transceiver. For FD communication,.i.e., simultaneous in-band uplink and downlink operation, same subcarriers can be allocated to UE in both uplink and downlink. Hence, contrary to traditional LTE, we propose using single-carrier frequency division multiple accesses (SC-FDMA) for downlink along with the conventional method of using it for uplink. The use of multiple antennas at eNB and singular value decomposition (SVD) in the downlink allows multiple users (MU) to operate on the s…
The TD-LTE system is envisaged to adopt dynamic time division duplexing (TDD) transmissions for small cells to adapt their communication service to the fast variation of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) traffic demands. However, different DL/UL directions for the same subframe in adjacent cells will result in new destructive interference components, i.e., eNB-to-eNB and UE-to-UE, with levels that can significantly differ from one subframe to another. In this paper, a feasible UL power control mechanism is proposed to manage eNB-to-eNB interference, where different UL power control parameters are …
Device-to-Device (D2D) communication, which enables direct communication between nearby mobile devices, is an attractive add-on component to improve spectrum efficiency and user experience by reusing licensed cellular spectrum in 5G system. In this paper, we propose to enable D2D communication in unlicensed spectrum (D2D-U) as an underlay of the uplink LTE network for further booming the network capacity. A sensing-based protocol is designed to support the unlicensed channel access for both LTE and D2D users. We further investigate the subchannel allocation problem to maximize the sum rate of …
The recent progress in the area of self-interference cancellation (SIC) design has enabled the development of full-duplex (FD) single and multiple antenna systems. In this paper, we propose a design for FD eNodeB (eNB) and user equipment (UE) for 5G networks. The use of FD operation enables simultaneous in-band uplink and downlink operation and thereby cutting down the spectrum requirement by half. FD operation requires the same subcarrier allocation to UE in both uplink and downlink. Long Term Evolution LTE) uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for downlink. To enable FD…
With exponential increase in the volumes of video traffic in cellular net-works, there is an increasing need for optimizing the quality of video delivery. 4G networks (Long Term Evolution Advanced or LTE A) are being introduced in many countries worldwide, which allow a downlink speed of upto 1 Gbps and uplink of 100 Mbps over a single base station. This makes a strong push towards video broadcasting over LTE networks, characterizing its performance and developing metrics which can be deployed to provide user feedback of video quality and feed-back them to network operators to fine tune the ne…
Cell association in cellular networks is an important aspect that impacts network capacity and eventually quality of experience. The scope of this work is to investigate the different and generalized cell association (CAS) strategies for Device-to-Device (D2D) communications in a cellular network infrastructure. To realize this, we optimize D2D-based cell association by using the notion of uplink and downlink decoupling that was proven to offer significant performance gains. We propose an integer linear programming (ILP) optimization framework to achieve efficient D2D cell association that min…
The reference scenario in this paper is a single cell in a Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) system, where multiple user equipments (UEs) aim at uploading some data to a central server or to the Cloud. The traditional uploading technique used in cellular systems, i.e., with separate links from each UE to the eNodeB, is compared to innovative \textit{relay-based} schemes that exploit Device-to-Device (D2D) communications between two (or more) UEs in proximity to each other. Differences in the channel quality experienced by the UEs offer an opportunity to develop D2D-based solutions, where \t…
In December 2017, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) released the first set of specifications for 5G New Radio (NR), which is currently the most widely accepted 5G cellular standard. 5G NR is expected to replace LTE and previous generations of cellular technology over the next several years, providing higher throughput, lower latency, and a host of new features. Similar to LTE, the 5G NR physical layer consists of several physical channels and signals, most of which are vital to the operation of the network. Unfortunately, like for any wireless technology, disruption through radio…
Full duplex (FD) communications has the potential to double the capacity of a half duplex (HD) system at the link level. However, FD operation increases the aggregate interference on each communication link, which limits the capacity improvement. In this paper, we investigate how much of the potential doubling can be practically achieved in the resource-managed, small multi-cellular system, similar to the TDD variant of LTE, both in indoor and outdoor environments, assuming FD base stations (BSs) and HD user equipment (UEs). We focus on low-powered small cellular systems, because they are more…
Cellular networks have special characteristics including highly variable channels, fast fluctuating capacities, deep per user buffers, self-inflicted queuing delays, radio uplink/downlink scheduling delays, etc. These distinguishing properties make the problem of achieving low latency and high throughput in cellular networks more challenging than in wired networks. That's why in this environment, TCP and its flavors, which are generally designed for wired networks, perform poorly. To cope with these challenges, we present C2TCP, a flexible end-to-end solution targeting interactive applications…
