Fairness and throughput performance of infrastructure IEEE 802.11 networks with hidden-nodes

The fairness behavior and throughput performance of IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function and request-to-send/clear-to-send channel access scheme in the presence of hidden nodes are investigated. A mathematical model which accurately predicts a user’s throughput performance and packet collision probability in non-saturated traffic and asymmetric hidden node environments is developed. The model allows us to see many interesting results in networks with hidden nodes. In an asymmetric hidden node network environment, the network fairness performance depends on the traffic load. In low traffic conditions, users get their fair share of the resources. However, in moderate-to-high traffic conditions, users that experience less number of hidden nodes dominate the network, causing badly located stations in a network to starve. In addition, the performance of request-to-send/clear-to-send channel access scheme, which is developed as a solution to hidden node problem, in networks with hidden nodes, is also estimated. It is shown that request-to-send/clear-to-send contention resolution scheme greatly improves the network fairness performance in hidden node scenarios. The developed model enables us to more accurately estimate the performance of practical wireless local area networks, where hidden node occurrence is common. Theoretical analysis presented in the paper is validated with simulation results.     

Quality of Service (QoS) evaluation of IEEE 802.11 WLAN using different PHY-Layer Standards

In this work, the performance of IEEE 802.11 WLAN scenarios is computed by evaluating Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as medium access delay, end to end delay, retransmission attempts and throughput at data rate of 54 Mbps by means of different mechanisms used in PHY- and MAC-layers. The Point Coordination Function (PCF) and Distribution Coordination Function (DCF) of MAC layer in conjunction with IEEE 802.11a (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing at 5 GHz Bandwidth) and IEEE 802.11 g (Extended data rate DSSS at 2.4 GHz Bandwidth) used in physical layer are evaluated and compared to offer a better mechanism that can provide better QoS at high data rates of 54 Mbps using OPNET MODELER 14.5 simulator.     

A novel power allocation strategy for cooperative PDMA systems

Cooperative communication technology is of great importance for increasing the user reachable rate, further improving throughput and reducing the outage probability of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. This paper mainly studies the power allocation optimization method based on amplify-and-forward (AF) pattern division multiple access (PDMA) to obtain the maximum achievable throughput. We formulate an optimization problem of user power allocation in a downlink PDMA system with cooperative relaying, the exact expressions of system throughput and user outage probability of the AF-PDMA system are derived, and a novel power allocation optimization method based on uniform distribution and restricted constraints is proposed. The effectiveness of the restricted constraints and optimization method is verified by theoretical analysis and simulation. The studies we have performed showed that the proposed scheme with uniform distribution and restricted constraints can be significantly improved in terms of the system throughput in comparison to the case with a genetic algorithm (GA) and fixed power allocation scheme. Concerning the proposed method, the search space is reduced to 1/3 of the original feasible region, and the runtime of the algorithm accounts for only 20% of the GA runtime.     

Joint optimal fair cooperative spectrum sensing and transmission in cognitive radio

Since the sensing power consumption of cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) will decrease the throughput of secondary users (SU) in cognitive radio (CR), a joint optimal model of fair CSS and transmission is proposed in this paper, which can compensate the sensing overhead of cooperative SUs. The model uses the periodic listen-before-transmission method, where each SU is assigned a portion of channel bandwidth, when the primary user (PU) is estimated to be free by the coordinator. Then, a joint optimization problem of local sensing time, number of cooperative SUs, transmission bandwidth and power is formulated, which can compensate the sensing overhead of cooperative SUs appropriately through choosing suitable compensating parameter. The proposed optimization problem can be solved by the Polyblock algorithm. Simulation results show that compared with the traditional model, the total system throughput of the fairness cooperation model decreases slightly, but the total throughput of the cooperative SUs improves obviously.     

Fairness-based user association and resource blocks allocation in satellite–terrestrial integrated networks

To meet the futuristic communications needs, a satellite–terrestrial integrated network (STIN) has been proposed and is a strong contender amongst emerging architectures. In our STIN model, we have considered a satellite-based base station (BS), dovetailed with a terrestrial N-tier heterogeneous network (HetNets). Our work considers jointly admission control of user equipment (UE), power allocation , fairness-based user association (UA), and fair spectrum resource allocation to UEs in STIN. With throughput maximization as an objective, considering such an environment, has not been investigated in the past. The formulated problem is a mixed integer non-linear programming (MINLP) problem that is Non-deterministic Polynomial-time Hard (NP-hard) and to achieve an optimal solution, it requires an exhaustive search. But, the computational load of exhaustive search increases exponentially as the number of UEs increases. Therefore, to obtain a near-optimal solution having low computational load an outer approximation algorithm (OAA) is proposed. To evaluate the proposed algorithm, extensive simulation work has been performed. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is verified by the results in terms of fairness in UA, fairness in resource block (RB) allocation, and throughput in the downlink (DL).     

Intelligent radio resource management in reconfigurable IRS-enabled NOMA networks

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are anticipated to provide reconfigurable propagation environment for next generation communication systems. In this paper, we investigate a downlink IRS-aided multi-carrier (MC) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, where the IRS is deployed to especially assist the blocked users to establish communication with the base station (BS). To maximize the system sum rate under network quality-of-service (QoS), rate fairness and successive interference cancellation (SIC) constraints, we formulate a problem for joint optimization of IRS elements, sub-channel assignment and power allocation. The formulated problem is mixed non-convex. Therefore, a novel three stage algorithm is proposed for the optimization of IRS elements, sub-channel assignment and power allocation. First, the IRS elements are optimized using the bisection method based iterative algorithm. Then, the sub-channel assignment problem is solved using one-to-one stable matching algorithm. Finally, the power allocation problem is solved under the given sub-channel and optimal number of IRS elements using Lagrangian dual-decomposition method based on Lagrangian multipliers. Moreover, in an effort to demonstrate the low-complexity of the proposed resource allocation scheme, we provide the complexity analysis of the proposed algorithms. The simulated results illustrate the various factors that impact the optimal number of IRS elements and the superiority of the proposed resource allocation approach in terms of network sum rate and user fairness. Furthermore, we analyze the proposed approach against a new performance metric called computational efficiency (CE).     

Joint uplink and downlink scheduling and UAV trajectory design in the presence of multiple unfriendly jammers and eavesdroppers

In this paper, we investigate secure uplink and downlink communications between an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and multiple user equipments (UEs) in the presence of multiple ground-based eavesdroppers (EVs) and unfriendly jammers. In order to guarantee the secure uplink and downlink transmissions, we consider a novel secure transmission scheme, which involves a power splitting based downlink transmission and scheduling of uplink and downlink transmission. Explicitly, we aim to maximize the average secrecy rate (ASR) by optimizing the UAV trajectory, the transmit power of the UAV and UEs, and scheduling of uplink and downlink transmission. Although the formulated problem is nonconvex, we propose an efficient solution by jointly applying the techniques of block coordinate descent and successive convex approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme achieves a better ASR than the benchmark schemes.     

A Method for Determining the Dielectric Constant of Microwave PCB Substrates

This paper presents a simple method for determining the dielectric constant of microwave PCB substrates. In the presented method, a bandpass microstrip filter designed on the PCB substrate with a user-predicted dielectric constant value is implemented for a given center frequency. The simulation results of the designed bandpass filter are obtained by the help of microwave design software; XFDTD?. Experimental results regarding the filter frequency characteristic are accomplished by means of a vector network analyzer. The simulation results of the designed filter are modified to overlap with the experimental ones by varying the dielectric constant value. When the simulation and experimental results are overlapped, the value of dielectric constant is accurately selected. In order to illustrate the validity of proposed method, the dielectric constant values of flame resistant-4 (FR4) substrates are acquired at IEEE 802.11b/g and IEEE 802.11a wireless local area network (WLAN) application frequencies. The results obtained by using the presented method agree with the previous studies in the literature.     

Optimal resource scheduling algorithm for cell boundaries users in heterogenous 5G networks

Deployment of small cells over the existing cellular network is an effective solution to improve the system coverage and throughput of fifth generation (5G) mobile communication networks. The arrival of the 5G mobile networks have demonstrated the importance of advanced scheduling techniques to manage the limited frequency spectrum available while achieving 5G transmission requirements. Cellular networks of the future necessitate the formulation of efficient resource allocation schemes that mitigate the interference between the different cells. In this research work, we formulate an optimization problem for heterogenous networks (HetNets) for resource allocation to maximize the system throughput among the cell center users (CCUs) and cell edge users (CEUs). We solve the optimization problem by effective utilization of the weight factors distribution for resource allocation. A novel Utility-based Resource Scheduling Algorithm (URSA) optimizes the resource sharing among the users with better delay budget of each application. The designed URSA ameliorates fairness along with reduced cross layer interference for real and non-real time applications. Performance of the URSA has been evaluated and compared most relevant state of art algorithms using the matlab based simulators. Furthermore, simulation results validate the superiority of the proposed scheduling scheme against conventional techniques in terms of throughput, fairness, and spectral efficiency.     

URLLC-oriented secure communication for UAV relay-assisted network

In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay-assisted secure short packet communication. The UAV acts as a decode-and-forward relay to transmit control signals from the source to the actuators in the presence of a ground eavesdropper (EV) whose imperfect channel state information is available at the UAV. Specially, non-orthogonal multiple access is adopted in our work to achieve more connections and improve the fairness of communication and the short packets are employed for data transmission to reduce the latency. Explicitly, we maximize the minimum average secrecy throughput among all actuators by jointly optimizing the UAV trajectory, transmit power and blocklength allocation, which generates a challenging optimization problem. Therefore, we propose an iterative algorithm based on block coordinate descent method and successive convex approximation technique to handle the non-convex problem. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme has better performance compared to the benchmark schemes.     

Metamaterial-embedded dual wideband microstrip antenna for 2.4 GHz WLAN and 8.2 GHz ITU band applications

ABSTRACT

A compact dual-band antenna designed for operating in IEEE 802.11b/g WLAN (2.4–2.484?GHz) and ITU frequency bands (8.01–8.5?GHz) is presented in this communication. The antenna has two distinct resonant modes generated with the help of three U-shaped transmission lines and a modified ground plane. A periodic repeating pattern of metamaterial unit cells integrated on the same plane of the substrate has enhanced the antenna performances using improved loading method. The measured bandwidth of the metamaterial-embedded antenna is increased by 16% in the lower operating band and 6% in the upper operating band. The compact proposed antenna provides wide measured bandwidths of about 40% (2–3?GHz) in the lower and 16% (8.19–9.63?GHz) in the upper frequency spectra. The maximum measured gain of the proposed antenna is increased around 3.63?dB at 2.36?GHz and 1?dB at 8.45?GHz. The proposed antenna radiator is about 89.6% compact with respect to a conventional antenna. An excellent agreement of the simulation with the benchmark results validates the design of the proposed structure.     

Bidirectional carrier aggregation in next-generation radio-over-fiber heterogeneous network based on FBMC

We have projected and verified a bidirectional intra-/inter-radio-access-technology carrier-aggregation method for a next-generation heterogeneous mobile network supported by filter bank multicarrier(FBMC). Successful transmission of intra/inter-band carrier aggregation between five broadband FBMC signals and three bands 4G long-term-evolution-advanced signal over 50 km single-mode fiber plus 10 m free-space is successfully broadcasted by employing an incoherent light-injection scheme in downlink. In uplink, two intra-bands carrier-aggregated wireless local area network Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.11 g signal is carried over the equal distance. High receiver sensitivity, low error vector magnitude, and clear constellation diagrams show successful delivery of different wireless services for different consumers. Therefore, the proposed hybrid system should become a potential solution for a future mobile front-haul network because of its low latency and high capacity.     

Metasurface aided intelligent reflecting surfaces for indoor GSSK-VLC downlink

To provide high-quality communication in the indoor generalized space shift keying (GSSK) aided visible light communications (VLC) downlink transmission, especially when the line-of-sight (LoS) link is blocked, a metasurface aided intelligent reflecting surfaces (mIRS) scheme is proposed. By controlling the reflection characteristics of incident light in a deliberate manner provided in this paper, the proposed mIRS-assisted indoor GSSK-VLC downlink can significantly enhance the signal quality at the receiver end. Furthermore, the maximum likelihood (ML) and efficient preprocessing enabled sparsity orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP) detectors are respectively presented for the considered system. Finally, simulations are demonstrated to verify the effectiveness of the proposed mIRS-assisted indoor GSSK-VLC downlink transmission.     

A matching-theoretic approach to resource allocation in D2D-enabled downlink NOMA cellular networks

This paper investigates the resource allocation problem in non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) cellular networks underlaid with OMA-based device-to-device (D2D) communication. This network architecture enjoys the intrinsic features of NOMA and D2D communications; namely, spectral efficiency, massive connectivity, and low-latency. Despite these indispensable features, the combination of NOMA and D2D communications exacerbates the resource allocation problem in cellular networks due to the tight coupling among their constraints and conflict over access to shared resources. The aim of our work is to maximize the downlink network sum-rate, while meeting the minimum rate requirements of the cellular tier and underlay D2D communication, and incorporating interference management as well as other practical constraints. To this end, many-to-many matching and difference-of-convex programming are employed to develop a holistic sub-channels and power allocation algorithmic solution. In addition to analyzing the properties of the proposed solution, its performance is benchmarked against an existing solution and the traditional OMA-based algorithm. The proposed solution demonstrates superiority in terms of network sum-rate, users’ connectivity, minimum rate satisfaction, fairness, and interference management, while maintaining acceptable computational complexity.     

Subchannel and power optimization for sum rate maximization in downlink multicarrier NOMA networks

In a multicarrier NOMA system, the subchannel allocation (SA) and power allocation (PA) are intricately linked and essential for improving system throughput. Also, for the successful execution of successive interference cancellations (SIC) at the receiver, a minimum power gap is required among users. As a result, this research comes up with optimization of the SA and PA to maximize the sum rate of the NOMA system while sticking to the minimum power gap constraint in addition to minimum user rate, maximum number of users in a subchannel and power budget constraints for downlink transmission in multicarrier NOMA networks. To ensure that the formulated problem can be solved in polynomial time, we propose solving it in two stages; SA followed by PA. To obtain SA, we investigate four algorithms: Greedy, WSA, WCA, and WCF. For PA, we propose a low-complexity algorithm. We compare the performance of the proposed method with benchmark method that does not consider the minimum power gap constraint. We conclude that employing WCF algorithm with the PA algorithm gives the best sum rate performance.     

Optimal Channel Selection algorithm for CRahNs

As the data traffic is increasing, the spectrum bands are getting congested. It causes low latency and unreliable communication. Additional spectrum can be utilized to solve this problem but moving towards higher frequency means higher power requirement and increased cost. Cognitive radio network is another solution to this problem. It helps the nodes of a network to use the channels of the nearby bands which are not being used at that time. However, it has several challenges. One of these challenges is the transmission collision with the primary users of the network. Researchers have been working on this problem. However, it is still a major concern for the researchers. This paper proposes an algorithm that selects the optimal cognitive channel for the data transmission by the secondary user in such a way so that the transmission collision with the PU is minimized. After comparison with the existing latest similar protocol, the proposed protocol has shown 5.6% improvement in the throughput, 5.3% improvement in PDR. The delay is decreased by 0.6% and the transmission collision with PUs is reduced by 2.5%.     

Investigation on wavelength re-modulated bi-directional passive optical network for different modulation formats

In this paper, the cost effective bi-directional passive optical network architecture with wavelength remodulated scheme is investigated. To realize the cost-effective PON, remodulation scheme is used, in which the downstream optical signal is reused as a carrier for the upstream transmission as it eliminates the need for an extra laser source at optical network units. The performance of proposed passive optical network is analyzed and compared for various modulation formats such as Non Return to Zero (NRZ), Return to Zero (RZ) and On–Off Keying (OOK) with 64 optical networks units (ONUs) at different traffic speed for downlink and uplink, respectively. It has been observed that the most suitable data format for proposed PON network is NRZ. Further the proposed system performance is compared with the current state-of-the-art PON architectures.     

Enabling 5G indoor services for residential environment using VLC technology

Visible light communication (VLC) has emerged as a viable complement to traditional radio frequency (RF) based systems and as an enabler for high data rate communications for beyond-5G (B5G) indoor communication systems. In particular, the emergence of new B5G-based applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements and massive connectivity has recently led to research on the required service-levels and the development of improved physical (PHY) layer methods. As part of recent VLC standards development activities, the IEEE has formed the 802.11bb “Light Communications (LC) for Wireless Local Area Networking” standardization group. This paper investigates the network requirements of 5G indoor services such as virtual reality (VR) and high-definition (HD) video for residential environments using VLC. In this paper, we consider such typical VLC scenarios with additional impairments such as light-emitting diode (LED) nonlinearity and imperfect channel feedback, and propose hyperparameter-free mitigation techniques using Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Space (RKHS) methods. In this context, we also propose using a direct current biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM)-based adaptive VLC transmission method that uses precomputed bit error rate (BER) expressions for these RKHS-based detection methods and performs adaptive BER-based modulation-order switching. Simulations of channel impulse responses (CIRs) show that the adaptive transmission method provides significantly improved error rate performance, which makes it promising for high data rate VLC-based 5G indoor services.     

On the ergodic sum rate for multiuser satellite–aerial–terrestrial networks

In this paper, we investigate the ergodic sum rate (ESR) for the downlink of a multi-user satellite–aerial–terrestrial network (SATN) with decode-and-forward (DF) protocol, where a multi-antenna unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) acts as an aerial relay to assist the signal convey from satellite to multiple terrestrial users, which is also corrupted by co-channel interference. To maximize the ESR of the considered system, a beamforming (BF) scheme based on statistical channel state information is proposed to conduct space division multiple access (SDMA) in the UAV–terrestrial links. Then, by assuming that the satellite–UAV link and the UAV–terrestrial links undergo correlated Shadowed-Rician fading and correlated Rayleigh fading, respectively, we derive the analytical expression of ESR for our considered system with proposed BF scheme. Finally, numerical results are provided to verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis and demonstrate the superiority of our proposed BF scheme.     

A cognitive MAC protocol for QoS provisioning in ad hoc networks

In this paper, we consider an ad hoc network overlaying a legacy time-division multiple access (TDMA) system. This kind of ad hoc and infrastructure-based coexisting architecture can have an important application for the future cognitive radio (CR) network. To establish an overlaying ad hoc network in the presence of primary users, the medium access control (MAC) protocol shall achieve high spectrum utilization, avoid interfering the primary user and establish the link quickly. To this end, we propose four enhanced mechanisms for the carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) MAC protocol: (1) a neighbor list establishment mechanism for recognizing spectrum usage opportunities, (2) a set of contention resolution methods to reduce the collision and delay variance, (3) an invited reservation procedure for meeting the delay requirements of real-time traffic, and (4) a distributed frame synchronization mechanism for coordinating transmission without a centralized controller. Compared to the legacy IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, the proposed CSMA/CA MAC protocol enhancement can improve the system throughput by 50% through analysis and NS-2 simulations, while keeping the dropping rate lower than 2% for delay-sensitive traffic. Furthermore, the standard deviation of the access delay is reduced by five times. With these QoS enhanced mechanisms, the proposed cognitive CSMA/CA MAC protocol can allow an ad hoc network to coexist with the legacy TDMA system.