Macro User Equipments Research Articles

Coverage Performance of Joint Transmission for Moving Relay Enabled Cellular Networks in Dense Urban Scenarios

Communication plays a significant role in terms of providing connectivity for urban users as well as sensors in smart cities. It has been shown that better communication capability for vehicular users can be obtained by introducing moving relays (MRs). With MRs, it is possible for macro base stations and moving relays to serve non-vehicular macro-users by performing coordinated multipoint (CoMP) joint transmission (JT). A bias-based CoMP scheme for MR enabled cellular network is analyzed in this paper. Motivated by antenna design constraints, in this paper, we assume that the outdoor antenna system of the MR can only be used for the moving backhaul link, i.e., the in-vehicle antenna system is also serving the non-vehicular macro-users. Using the stochastic geometry approach, a tractable model of the network is proposed. Based on the proposed model, integral expressions for CoMP-JT probability and coverage probability of non-vehicular macro user equipment are derived. Simulations verify the accuracy of the derived expressions. The results show that the probability for macro user equipment to be served with CoMP-JT is up to 70% when the intensity of MRs is ten times that of MBSs. This paper also includes a performance comparison among the analyzed scheme and related works. CoMP-JT with MRs provides better coverage performance for nearby macro user equipment. It can be found that the coverage gain of CoMP increases when the intensity of MRs increases within a certain range. Simulation results provide insights for practical system design in smart cities, such as the optimal MR intensity and the feasibility for opening access of MRs to macro user equipment.

Macrocell Protection Interference Alignment in Two-Tier Downlink Heterogeneous Networks

Conventional interference alignment (IA) has been developed to mitigate interference problems for the coexistence of picocells and macrocells. This paper proposes a macrocell protection interference alignment (MCP-IA) in two-tier MIMO downlink heterogeneous networks. The proposed method aligns the interference of the macro user equipment (UE) and mitigates the interference of the pico-UEs with a minimum mean squared error interference rejection combining (MMSE-IRC) receiver. Compared to the conventional IA, the proposed MCP-IA provides an additional array gain obtained by the precoder design of the macro BS and a diversity gain achieved by signal space selections. The degrees of freedom (DoF) of the proposed MCP-IA are equal to or greater than that of the conventional IA and are derived theoretically. Link level simulations show the link capacity and the DoF of the macro UE, and also exhibit the proposed MCP-IA attaining additional array gain and diversity gain. The system level simulation illustrates that the proposed method prevents the interference of the macro UE completely and preserves the throughput of the pico-UE irrespective of the number of picocells. For 4×2 antenna configuration, the system level simulation demonstrates that the proposed MCP-IA throughput of the macro UE is not affected by the number of picocells and that the proposed MCP-IA throughput of the picocells approaches that of single-user MIMO (SU-MIMO) with a 3% loss.

Incentive Mechanism for Hybrid Access in Cognitive Femtocell Networks

In this paper, we propose a new incentive mechanism for hybrid access in cognitive femtocell networks. The purpose of the proposed incentive mechanism is to guarantee the QoS of macro user equipments (MUEs) and to increase femtocell capacity. MUEs channel condition report triggers bidding procedure by neighbor femtocell base stations (FBS). Macro base station (MBS) can offer some subchannels as rewards to encourage FBSs to reliably support its MUEs. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.

Distributed coalitional game for friendly jammer selection in ultra-dense networks

Consider an ultra-dense heterogeneous network with one malicious eavesdropper intercepting macro-layer information. A portion of small-cell base stations (SBSs) acts as the friendly jammer to help improving macro-users’secrecy rate by transmitting interference signal on the wiretap channel. In return, the client macro-user pays to its jammers for the jamming power that they provide. Instead of transmitting noise as traditional jammers do, this paper proposes a modified spectrum leasing method, which allows SBSs to replace the thermal noise with their own traffic. This approach also permits the jamming SBSs to access extra spectrum in order to enhance the performance. In the considered scenario, the macro-user tries to find the SBSs that can mostly protect its confidential message, while each SBS decides whether to serve as a jammer or not. Once an SBS decides to be a jammer, it needs to choose the optimal client macro-user depending on the channel condition. This two-way selection problem between SBSs and macro-users is modeled as the coalition formation game with non-transferable utility, and a distributed scheme is proposed for this game, in which the players (macro-users and SBSs) individually make a decision and converge to a Nash-stable partition in a self-organized manner. The simulation results show that the majority of macro-user equipments enjoy a fivefold increment in average secrecy rate and that the friendly jammer scheme effectively protects the macro-users from the eavesdropper. At the same time, the average capacity of small-cell layer also achieves a 16.92 % improvement.

A Tractable Approach to Uplink Spectral Efficiency of Two-Tier Massive MIMO Cellular HetNets

This letter investigates the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) of a two-tier cellular network, where massive multiple-input multiple-output macro base stations are overlaid with dense small cells. Macro user equipments (MUEs) and small cells with single user equipment uniformly scattered are modeled as two independent homogeneous Poisson point processes. By applying stochastic geometry, we analyze the multiuser uplink SE at a macro base station that employs a zero-forcing detector and we obtain a novel lower bound as well as its approximation. According to the simple and near-exact analytical expression, we observe that the ideal way to improve the SE is by increasing the MUE density and the base station antennas synchronously rather than increasing them individually. Furthermore, a large value of path loss exponent has a positive effect on the SE due to the reduced aggregated interference.

Power Allocation Scheme for Femto-to-Macro Downlink Interference Reduction for Smart Devices in Ambient Intelligence

In this paper, we present an analysis on the characteristics of cross-tier interference in regard to femtocells deployed in LTE cellular networks. We also present a cross-tier SLNR-based water filling (CSWF) power allocation algorithm for the reduction of interference from femtocell to macrocell for smart devices used in ambient intelligence. The results of this study show that CSWF significantly improves the macro UE performance around a femtocell access point (AP) from the SINR and throughput perspective. The CSWF algorithm also provides a relative gain on the throughput of femtocell UEs compared to frequency partitioning. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm has a low complexity and is implemented on the femto-AP side only, therefore not affecting the macro system.

UE Relaying Cooperation Over D2D Uplink in Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

We consider beamformer optimization for user equipment (UE) relaying cooperation in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCNs), where the interference from femto cells nearby aggravates the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of a macro UE (MUE). A femto UE acts as a relay over device-to-device (D2D) uplink and forward to the MUE, the composite of desired signal and interference to improve the post SINR of the MUE. The beamformers of the UE relay and MUE collaborate to make a balance between the two signals so that the output signal after multistage maximal-ratio combining (MS-MRC) yields a sufficient post SINR for the desired signal. We first consider the case with a single interfering femto access point (FAP) and show that the beamforming for dual-stage MRC can effectively handle the interference. Then, the idea is generalized to the case of two interfering FAPs with a three-stage MRC. A geodesic geometry view allows us to parameterize the BF design with the angles that the involved channel vectors make. This approach makes the optimization of the BF simpler, reduces the feedback overhead, and provides better insight into the problem at hand. Simulations are carried out to validate the performance of the UE relaying cooperation in HCN environments.

Full Duplex-Assisted Intercell Interference Cancellation in Heterogeneous Networks

This paper studies the suppression of cross-tier intercell interference (ICI) generated by a macro base station (MBS) to pico user equipments (PUEs) in heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Different from existing ICI avoidance schemes such as enhanced ICI cancellation (eICIC) and coordinated beamforming, which generally operate at the MBS, we propose a full duplex (FD)-assisted ICI cancellation (fICIC) scheme, which can operate at each pico BS (PBS) individually and is transparent to the MBS. The basic idea of the fICIC is to apply FD technique at the PBS such that the PBS can send the desired signals and forward the listened cross-tier ICI simultaneously to PUEs. We first consider the narrowband single-user case, where the MBS serves a single macro UE and each PBS serves a single PUE. We obtain the closed-form solution of the optimal fICIC scheme, and analyze its asymptotical performance in ICI-dominated scenario. We then investigate the general narrowband multiuser case, where both MBS and PBSs serve multiple UEs. We devise a low-complexity algorithm to optimize the fICIC aimed at maximizing the downlink sum rate of the PUEs subject to user fairness constraint. Finally, the generalization of the fICIC to wideband systems is investigated. Simulations validate the analytical results and demonstrate the advantages of the fICIC on mitigating cross-tier ICI.

Dynamic Access and Power Control Scheme for Interference Mitigation in Femtocell Networks

The femtocell network, which is designed for low power transmission and consists of consumer installed small base stations, coexists with macrocells to exploit spatial reuse gain. For its realization, cross-tier interference mitigation is an important issue. To solve this problem, we propose a joint access and power control scheme that requires limited information exchange between the femto and macro networks. Our objective is to maximize the network throughput while satisfying each users quality of service (QoS) requirement. To accomplish this, we first introduce two distributed interference detection schemes, i.e., the femto base station and macro user equipment based schemes. Then, the proposed scheme dynamically adjusts the transmission power and makes a decision on the access mode of each femto base station. Through extensive simulations, we show that the proposed scheme outperforms earlier works in terms of the throughput and outage probability.

Interference Alignment Based Transceiver Design in OSG mode of HetNets

This paper focuses on solving co-channel interference (CCI) issues arising in the open subscriber group (OSG) mode of heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Considering a general framework consisting of arbitrary number of picocells within a macro cell, where the inter-user interference (IUI) is the main CCI to macro user equipments (UEs), while the the inter-cell interference (ICI) is the major CCI to pico UEs. In this paper, three IA based transceiver design schemes are proposed. For macro cell, we uniformly use block diagonalization (BD) scheme to eliminate the IUI. And for picocells, three IA schemes are proposed to mitigate the ICI. The first scheme, named as zero forcing IA (ZF-IA) scheme, aligns the inter picocell interference onto an arbitrary sub-space of the cross-tier interference using ZF scheme. Considering the channel state information (CSI) of the desired channel of pico UEs, the second scheme, named as optimal desired sub-channel selected IA (ODC-IA) scheme, aligns the inter picocell interference onto a certain sub-space of the cross-tier interference, which guarantees the largest channel gain of the desired signal of pico UEs. The third IA scheme, named as maximum cross-tier interference selected IA (MI-IA) scheme, is designed for the system with less receive antennas. The inter picocell interference is aligned onto the space of the strongest cross-tier interference and only the interference on this space is nullified. The complexity analysis and simulations show that the proposed transceiver design schemes outperform the existing IA schemes in the OSG mode of HetNets, and the MI-IA scheme reduces the requirement of the receive antennas number with lower complexity.

Downlink performance of two‐tier networks with time‐hopping modulation

With growing demand for high data rates, the mobile network has faced excessive traffic and it seems that one of the few long-term solutions to this problem is employing femtocells which improve capacity and indoors coverage. In the typical femtocell networks, co- and cross-layer interferences caused by simultaneous transmission of macrocell base stations and femtocell access points in the same frequency band, results in dead spots especially if femtocells are densely employed. In this study, to mitigate the interference and improve the system's performance, the authors study the application of time-hopping approach. Particularly, the impact of aggressive signals of femto access points on a macro user equipment located in the second tier, that is, the femtocell coverage area, is analysed and the semi-closed-form expression for the system outage probability is derived. Based on the analysis, they also simulate the transmission capacity (TC) that represents the total capacity of the co-channel two-tier networks with outage constraints. Next, employing Gaussian approximations, they derive upper and lower bounds on the outage probability. These bounds provide better insight on the effect of system's parameters on its performance. Their numerical results show that the time-hopping technique significantly reduces the outage probability and therefore increases the TC of two-tier networks.

Coordinated multi-point transmission for relaxation of self-backhauling bottlenecks in heterogeneous networks

The heterogeneous deployment of high-power macro cells and low-power nodes (LPNs) is now widely acknowledged as an essential requirement towards meeting the continued demand for mobile data capacity. The selection of the optimum backhaul solution for the LPNs obliges operators to consider not only the capacity of the backhaul but also other key factors so as to fully leverage the benefits provided by LPNs: the cost of the backhauling may limit the density of LPN deployments and the backhaul configuration requirements impact on the flexibility of LPN deployment. To that end, self-backhauling of LPNs via the existing macro radio access network (RAN) provides an attractive solution, particularly for deployment scenarios that are very cost-sensitive and/or require high flexibility. However, use of self-backhauling usually makes backhaul as a bottleneck due to the a) limited bandwidth allocated for legacy macro RAN, b) the need to share resources with macro user equipment (UE), and c) the high-intercell interference particularly in the macro cell edge. In this paper, we provide an overview of self-backhauled LPNs and investigate possible performance enhancements through the use of coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission to relax the downlink backhaul capacity bottleneck for self-backhauled LPNs. To that end, we carry out analytical studies for a practical limited-feedback CoMP technique and numerically verify the derived capacity outage expressions. Furthermore, we implement a simulation study for an exemplary heterogeneous network deployment in a realistic radio propagation environment. The results of the studies demonstrate that significant spectral efficiency and throughput gains for the LPN backhaul are achievable through the use of selected CoMP technique under realizable feedback overhead, even under feedback bit error. The achieved relaxation in the backhaul bottleneck is observed providing improved performance for the UEs served by the LPNs. Furthermore, more resources will be available for macro UEs leading to overall performance gains compared to the case without CoMP.

Cell Selection and Resource Allocation for Interference Management in a Macro-Picocell Heterogeneous Network

A heterogeneous network (HetNet) based on the long-term evolution advanced standard has been developed to improve the system performance; in this HetNet, macrocells and low-power nodes, such as picocells, coexist. Further, cell range expansion has been introduced to encourage data offloading in a HetNet. In this paper, we propose a cell selection scheme based on the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio to achieve an optimal offloading effect. We also propose a resource allocation scheme in the frequency and time domains, to reduce interference in a HetNet. In the frequency domain, the macrocells allocate a frequency band by using soft frequency reuse, and the picocells choose the sub-bands that are not used in the macrocell sector, to avoid interference. In addition, we found that it was difficult to allocate a limited frequency resource. Therefore, the cross-tier interference can be managed by using an almost blank subframe (ABS) with a flexible ABS ratio, to improve spectrum efficiency in the time domain. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes can improve the spectrum efficiency of both the macro-user equipment and the pico-user equipment, as well as improve the overall UE performance.

Game theoretic approach for joint resource allocation in spectrum sharing femtocell networks

In this paper, we study the joint price and power allocation in spectrum sharing macro-femtocell networks. The proposed game theoretic framework is based on bi-level Stackelberg game where macro base station (MBS) works as a leader and underlaid femto base stations (FBSs) work as followers. MBS has fixed data rate and imposes interference price on FBSs for maintaining its data rate and earns revenue while FBSs jointly adjust their power for maximizing their data rates and utility functions. Since the interference from FBSs to macro user equipment is kept under a given threshold and FBSs compete against each other for power allocation, there is a need to determine a power allocation strategy which converges to Stackelberg equilibrium. We consider two cases for MBS power allocation, i.e., fixed and dynamic power. MBS can adjust its power in case of dynamic power allocation according to its minimum data rate requirement and number of FBSs willing to share the spectrum. For both cases we consider uniform and nonuniform pricing where MBS charges same price to all FBSs for uniform pricing and different price to each FBS for non-uniform pricing according to its induced interference. We obtain unique closed form solution for each case if the co-interference at FBSs is assumed fixed. And an iterative algorithm which converges rapidly is also proposed to take into account the effect of co-tier interference on interference price and power allocation strategy. The results are explained with numerical simulation examples which validate the effectiveness of our proposed solutions.

Throughput and cost‐efficient interference cancelation strategies for the downlink of spectrum‐sharing Long Term Evolution heterogeneous networks

AbstractIn a heterogeneous network (HetNet), small cells such as femtocells considered in this work are deployed jointly with macrocells. This new cells' layer, when added to the network, generates interference, which could hamper neighboring macro‐user equipment (MUE) and femto‐user equipment (FUE) transmissions. In fact, this interference results in degradation of the network performance. In this paper, we propose a downlink interference cancelation (DL‐IC) strategy for spectrum‐sharing Long Term Evolution (LTE) HetNet. This DL‐IC strategy aims to reduce the interference impact on users by optimizing their received signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) using new utility functions for both FUEs and MUEs. These utility functions allow relaxation of the cancelation ratios in order to reduce implementation complexity while maximizing SINR, QoS, and throughput. We support by different system‐level simulations that both global network performance and user experience in terms of total throughput and received SNR or link‐level throughput, respectively, are significantly enhanced. Throughput gains achievable by the new DL‐IC strategy can reach as much as 200% against a homogeneous LTE network without IC along with an extra 48% per additional femtocell base station against a basic spectrum‐sharing LTE HetNet without IC. These performance figures are shown to surpass those achieved by interference avoidance techniques using either power or frequency resource allocation. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Best effort spectrum allocation scheme for femtocell networks in dense deployment

In orthogonal frequency division multiple access(OFDMA) based femtocell networks,the co-tier interference among femto base stations(FBS) becomes important in multiuser and densely deployed environment.In order to mitigate the co-tier interference and enhance the system total throughput,this paper proposed a best effort spectrum allocation scheme based on the extension of graph theory.In the scheme,a controller was proposed to collect the channel state information(CSI)of all femtocell user equipments(FUEs) in a certain range.Then,the controller evaluated the signal-to-interference Ratio(SIR) of each FUE and determined the set of its interference neighbors.By calculating the received power matrix(RPM) among FUEs and building interference graph matrix(IGM),different spectrum resource blocks(RBs) were assigned to the users with interference relation,while users without interference relation shared the same RBs,which could increase the spectrum efficiency.Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve the RB usage efficiency compared with the basic graph coloring theory,and more than 80% improvement can be acquired in dense deployment scenario.Besides,the throughput of both cell edge macro user equipments(MUEs) and cell edge FUEs is guaranteed on the premise of low interference.

Tier-Aware Resource Allocation in OFDMA Macrocell-Small Cell Networks

We present a joint sub-channel and power allocation framework for downlink transmission in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA)-based cellular network composed of a macrocell overlaid by small cells. In this framework, the resource allocation (RA) problems for both the macrocell and small cells are formulated as optimization problems. For the macrocell, we formulate an RA problem that is aware of the existence of the small cell tier. In this problem, the macrocell performs RA to satisfy the data rate requirements of macro user equipments (MUEs) while maximizing the tolerable interference from the small cell tier on its allocated sub-channels. Although the RA problem for the macrocell is shown to be a mixed integer nonlinear problem (MINLP), we prove that the macrocell can solve another alternate optimization problem that will yield the optimal solution with reduced complexity. For the small cells, following the same idea of tier-awareness, we formulate an optimization problem that accounts for both RA and admission control (AC) and aims at maximizing the number of admitted users while simultaneously minimizing the consumed bandwidth. Similar to the macrocell optimization problem, the small cell problem is shown to be an MINLP. We obtain a sub-optimal solution to the MINLP problem relying on convex relaxation. In addition, we employ the dual decomposition technique to have a distributed solution for the small cell tier. Numerical results confirm the performance gains of our proposed RA formulation for the macrocell over the traditional resource allocation based on minimizing the transmission power. Besides, it is shown that the formulation based on convex relaxation yields a similar behavior to the MINLP formulation. Also, the distributed solution converges to the same solution obtained by solving the corresponding convex optimization problem in a centralized fashion.

Radio Resource Management Scheme for Relieving Interference to MUEs in Relay-Based Cellular Networks

Relay nodes (RNs) have been recently introduced as a cost-effective solution to achieve ubiquitous high data rates in cellular networks. By providing a two-hop link between evolved nodeB (eNB) and user equipment (UE), RNs can improve the UE's signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and throughput. A typical relay-based cellular network is comprised of macro UEs (MUEs) that are served directly by eNB and relay UEs (RUEs) that are served via RNs. The performance of the entire network is degraded if the interference between RNs and MUEs is not carefully managed. In this paper, we propose a radio resource management scheme that effectively exploits the advantages of RNs without causing severe interference to MUEs, which yields a better overall network and cell-edge user throughput. To improve channel quality of MUEs located nearby RNs, the proposed scheme determines a specific set of subchannels to be used by each RN. Second, the proposed scheme assigns subchannels to UEs and RNs considering channel quality, average UE data rate, and the number of required subchannels at RNs. For resource allocation, we formulate a binary integer linear programming (BILP) problem and propose a novel heuristic algorithm to reduce its computational complexity. Our simulation results show that the heuristic algorithm achieves similar performance with the BILP. In addition, we discuss a detailed procedure for control signal exchange and data transmission and analyze the lower bound of SINR gain of MUEs obtained from the proposed scheme. It has been shown that the proposed scheme improves the overall network throughput and the cell-edge user throughput compared with existing schemes.

Proximity User Detection Based Resource Allocation Scheme for Device-to-device Communication

In this paper, we propose a resource allocation schemes, called proximity user detection-based resource allocation (PUDRA), or advanced proximity user detection-based resource allocation (APUDRA) in an LTE-Advanced device-to-device (D2D) network. In the proposed schemes, in order to reduce the interference between macro user equipment (mUEs) and D2D links or between D2D links, D2D link shall use a frequency bandwidth that the neighboring mUEs or D2D links do not use. We analyzed and compared the two schemes and the random resource allocation scheme in terms of the system throughput for downlink and outage probability according to the number of D2D receivers (D2DRs). Simulation results show that the APUDRA scheme has better performance than the PUDRA and random resource allocation scheme performance in terms of the system throughput and outage probability for mUEs and D2DRs.

셀룰러 네트워크상의 D2D 통신을 위한 공유릴레이 기반 간섭 관리 기법

D2D (Device-to-Device) communication on an underlying cellular infrastructure which exploits the same spectrum has several advantages such as increased resource utilization and improved cellular coverage. However, D2D communication system needs to cope with ICI (Inter-Cell Interference) and interference between cellular and D2D links. As a result, macro UEs (User Equipments), especially those located near cell edge, will suffer from serious link performance degradation. We propose a novel interference avoidance mechanism assisted by SRN (Shared Relay Node) in this paper. SRN not only performs data re-transmission as a usual Type II relay but also has several features newly defined to avoid interference between cellular and D2D links. In particular, we suggest resource allocation methods based on the SRN for effective interference avoidance, and evaluate their performance through computer simulations.