Spectrum Efficiency Loss Research Articles

DPavatar: A Real-Time Location Protection Framework for Incumbent Users in Cognitive Radio Networks

Dynamic spectrum sharing between licensed incumbent users (IUs) and unlicensed wireless industries has been well recognized as an efficient approach to solving spectrum scarcity as well as creating spectrum markets. Recently, both US and European governments called a ruling on opening up spectrum that was initially licensed to sensitive military/federal systems. However, this introduces serious concerns on operational privacy (e.g., location, time, and frequency of use) of IUs for national security concerns. Although several works have proposed obfuscation methods to address this problem, these techniques only rely on syntactic privacy models, lacking rigorous privacy guarantee. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive framework to provide real-time differential location privacy for sensitive IUs. We design a utility-optimal differentially private mechanism to reduce the loss in spectrum efficiency while protecting IUs from harmful interference. Furthermore, we strategically combine differential privacy with another privacy notion, expected inference error, to provide double shield protection for IU's location privacy. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our design and demonstrate significant improvements in utility and location privacy compared with other existing mechanisms.

Damped Zero-Pseudorandom Noise OFDM Systems

This paper proposed a new OFDM scheme called damped zero-pseudorandom noise orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DZPN-OFDM) scheme. In the proposed scheme, ZPN-OFDM non-zero part damped to reduce the guard interval energy as well as the mutual interference power in-between the data and training blocks, and conservative the pseudo-noise conventional properties required for channel estimation or synchronization. The motivation of this paper is the OFDM long guard interval working in wide dispersion channels, where significant energy waste if conventional ZPN-OFDM is used as well as the BER performance degradation. Also, to solve the ZPN-OFDM spectrum efficiency loss problem, the proposed scheme doesn’t duplicate the guard interval. Both detailed performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed DZPN-OFDM scheme can, indeed, offer significant bit error rate, spectrum efficiency as well as energy efficiency improvement.

Balancing energy efficiency and spectrum efficiency for lower error rate in bidirectional relay networks

A scheme for combining data rate, energy efficiency and relay location in bidirectional amplify-and-forward relay networks is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme allows the energy consumption to be evaluated for all positions of a chosen relay along a line between the transmitter and the destination. Furthermore, the evaluated energy reduction is used to obtain the optimal balance between the energy efficiency (EE) and spectrum efficiency (SE). This balance enables the EE to increase significantly with the least loss of SE. Such a balance is then expressed with respect to the bit error rate. Numerical examples are provided to validate the analysis.

Design and Performance Analysis of a Fairness-Based License-Assisted Access and Resource Scheduling Scheme

In face of the explosive surge of mobile data services, spectrum aggregation or carrier aggregation technology has been proposed to improve system throughput and spectrum efficiency (SE) by aggregating licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands. However, the system performances would be severely deteriorated by the channel access collision if the channel access and resource scheduling approaches are not coordinated among different networks in the same spectrum band. Therefore, in order to improve the system throughput and the SE, a fairness-based license-assisted access and resource scheduling scheme are designed for the coexisting systems, incorporating long term evolution-advanced and WiFi systems in the unlicensed band. The optimal sizes of the contention window in the proposed fairness-based channel access approach are obtained in terms of various density ratios between these two systems. Furthermore, a novel resource scheduling approach employing linear programming is proposed to maximize the utility function with the goal of improving the service experience of users and the SE with various spectrum qualities. The theoretical proofs and simulation results verify the enhanced performances of the proposed approaches in terms of key metrics, such as throughput, SE, delay, and packet loss ratio.

Spectrally efficient sensing protocol in cognitive relay systems

In this study, the authors consider a cognitive radio scenario and focus on the spectrum efficiency of sensing-transmission protocols for a secondary dual-hop relay system. A straightforward dedicated sensing protocol is first considered as a benchmark, where sensing is performed in dedicated sensing periods at both the source (S) and the relay (R) before their respective transmissions. This, however, leads to a substantial loss in spectrum efficiency for the secondary system. In view of the spectrum efficiency loss in the dedicated sensing protocol, the authors propose an alternative approach, namely simultaneous sensing protocol. In this protocol, sensing is only performed at S, during the period when R transmits to destination (D), by cancelling out the self-interference component that is known a priori. The authors derive the closed-form expression of the average probability of detection for the proposed simultaneous sensing protocol. Furthermore, by deriving the average collision time and average utilisation time for both the dedicated and simultaneous sensing protocols, the authors show that the simultaneous sensing protocol significantly improves the spectrum efficiency for the secondary system and also achieves a higher overall spectrum utilisation of the spectrum band, compared to the dedicated sensing protocol.

Improved Linear Transmit Processing for Single-User and Multi-User MIMO Communications Systems

In this paper, we propose a novel linear transmit precoding strategy for multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) systems employing improper signal constellations. In particular, improved zero-forcing (ZF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) precoders are derived based on modified cost functions, and are shown to achieve a superior performance without loss of spectrum efficiency compared to the conventional linear and nonlinear precoders. The superiority of the proposed precoders over the conventional solutions are verified by both simulation and analytical results. The novel approach to precoding design is also applied to the case of an imperfect channel estimate with a known error covariance as well as to the multi-user scenario where precoding based on the nullspace of channel transmission matrix is employed to decouple multi-user channels. In both cases, the improved precoding schemes yield significant performance gain compared to the conventional counterparts.

Capacity Analysis for Indoor PLC Using Different Multi-Carrier Modulation Schemes

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)/discrete multi-tone (DMT) has been proposed as a suitable modulation for power-line communications. However, its drawbacks, e.g., bad frequency localization and spectrum efficiency loss due to cyclic prefix (CP) appending, are also obvious. On the other hand, the hermitian symmetric (HS) version of OFDM/OQAM modulation has been presented as a good alternative to DMT. It retains full spectrum efficiency (i.e., no CP appending) and has good time-frequency localization. But, its weakness of remaining interference leads people to hesitate to choose an appropriate scheme between DMT and HS-OQAM. This paper addresses the analysis of the tradeoff between spectrum efficiency and interference of these two schemes in terms of transmission capacity and finally gives a reference signal-to-noise ratio threshold w.r.t. the corresponding channel environment to decide which scheme is better over the other.

Beam Pattern Scanning (BPS) versus Space-Time Block Coding (STBC) and Space-Time Trellis Coding (STTC)

In this paper, Beam Pattern Scanning (BPS), a transmit diversity technique, is compared with two well known transmit diversity techniques, space-time block coding (STBC) and space-time trellis coding (STTC). In BPS (also called beam pattern oscillation), controlled time varying weight vectors are applied to the antenna array elements mounted at the base station (BS). This creates a small movement in the antenna array pattern directed toward the desired user. In rich scattering environments, this small beam pattern movement creates an artificial fast fading channel. The receiver is designed to exploit time diversity benefits of the fast fading channel. Via the application of simple combining techniques, BPS improves the probability-of-error performance and network capacity with minimal cost and complexity. In this work, to highlight the potential of the BPS, we compare BPS and Space-Time Coding (i.e., STBC and STTC) schemes. The comparisons are in terms of their complexity, system physical dimension, network capacity, probability-of-error performance, and spectrum efficiency. It is shown that BPS leads to higher network capacity and performance with a smaller antenna dimension and complexity with minimal loss in spectrum efficiency. This identifies BPS as a promising scheme for future wireless communications with smart antennas.

Performance bounds for two-way amplify-and-forward relaying

In this paper, the average sum rate of two-way amplify-and-forward (AF) half-duplex relaying system is analyzed. To this end, we first derive the harmonic mean of two independent gamma distributed random variables which have the same shape parameter but different scale parameters. By deriving tight upper and lower bounds for the average sum rate of two-way relaying, we verify that two-way relaying can significantly recover the spectrum efficiency loss of one-way relaying. We also extend the two-way AF half-duplex relaying to the case where source and destination terminals both transmit Alamouti's orthogonal space time block code (OSTBC) utilizing two antennas and the relay has only one antenna. By deriving both upper and lower bounds for the average sum rate as well as an upper bound for the pairwise error probability (PEP) for the proposed two-way OSTBC scheme, we show that the average sum rate is further improved compared to the single antenna case and a diversity order of two is also achieved. Furthermore, optimal power allocations under a global power constraint for two-way relaying with single antenna and the proposed two-way OSTBC scheme are derived analytically.