Afif Osseiran

The Foundation of the Mobile and Wireless Communications System for 2020 and Beyond: Challenges, Enablers and Technology Solutions

In 2020, mobile and wireless traffic volume is expected to increase thousand-fold over 2010 figures. Moreover, an increase in the number of wirelessly-connected devices to counts in the tens of billions will have a profound impact on society. Massive machine communication, forming the basis for the Internet of Things, will make our everyday life more efficient, comfortable and safer, through a wide range of applications including traffic safety and medical services. The variety of applications and data traffic types will be significantly larger than today, and will result in more diverse requirements on services, devices and networks. METIS is set up by leading global players to prepare the migration towards tomorrows multi-purpose global communication infrastructure, serving humans and things. The main objective of METIS is to lay the foundation for this future global mobile and wireless communications system, and to generate a global consensus here. In particular, METIS will provide new solutions which fit the needs beyond 2020.

5G Mobile and Wireless Communications Technology

Written by leading experts in 5G research, this book is a comprehensive overview of the current state of 5G. Covering everything from the most likely use cases, spectrum aspects, and a wide range of technology options to potential 5G system architectures, it is an indispensable reference for academics and professionals involved in wireless and mobile communications. Global research efforts are summarised, and key component technologies including D2D, mm-wave communications, massive MIMO, coordinated multi-point, wireless network coding, interference management and spectrum issues are described and explained. The significance of 5G for the automotive, building, energy, and manufacturing economic sectors is addressed, as is the relationship between IoT, machine type communications, and cyber-physical systems. This essential resource equips you with a solid insight into the nature, impact and opportunities of 5G.

Mobile and Wireless Communications for IMT-Advanced and Beyond

A timely addition to the understanding of IMT-Advanced, this book places particular emphasis on the new areas which IMT-Advanced technologies rely on compared with their predecessors. These latest areas include Radio Resource Management, Carrier Aggregation, improved MIMO support and Relaying.Each technique is thoroughly described and illustrated before being surveyed in context of the LTE-Advanced standards. The book also presents state-of-the-art information on the different aspects of the work of standardization bodies (such as 3GPP and IEEE), making global links between them.Explores the latest research innovations to assess the future of the LTE standardCovers the latest research techniques for beyond IMT-Advanced such as Coordinated multi-point systems (CoMP), Network Coding, Device-to-Device and Spectrum SharingContains key information for researchers from academia and industry, engineers, regulators and decision makers working on LTE-Advanced and beyond

Relay Communication with Delay Diversity for Future Communication Systems

In this paper we consider relay communication as a way of increasing the diversity gain in fading wireless environments. The idea is to combine relay communication with delay diversity where each relay introduces a certain time delay to the signal before forwarding. The result is an increased frequency selectivity in the relay channel which can be exploited at the receiver. The obtained results show that, for single carrier signals with frequency domain equalization, considerable performance gain is obtained.

Distributed Relay Diversity Systems for OFDM-Based Networks

In this paper, distributed relay diversity systems are analyzed, modeled and evaluated in an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) based networks. The investigated distributed relay diversity schemes extend the ideas of a single hop transmit antenna schemes such as Cyclic Delay Diversity (CDD), Space Time Transmit Diversity (STTD), transmit Coherent Combining (CC) and Selection Diversity (SD) to distributed diversity systems. In contrast to the classical single hop system, the antennas in the distributed systems belongs to distributed relays instead of being co-located at the transmitter. The distributed relay diversity methods considered in this paper: Relay CDD (RCDD), Relay Alamouti (i.e.STTD), Relay CC (RCC) and Relay SD (RSD) are compared to the traditional 1-hop system. Analytical expressions for the received Signal to Interference Noise Ratio (SINR) are derived and used in a dynamic multi-cell multi-user simulator. Results show considerable SINR gains for both Round Robin and Max-SINR schedulers. The SINR gains translate into substantial cell throughput gains, up to 200%, compared to 1-hop systems. Despite its low complexity, the RCDD scheme has similar performance to that of other more sophisticated 2-hop schemes such as Relay Alamouti and Relay Coherent Combining. Marginally better results are observed for the Relay Selection Diversity scheme.

IMT-Advanced and next-generation mobile networks [Guest Editorial]

Globally, mobile communications are moving toward broadband communication systems to meet the challenges of significantly increasing data traffic such as that for mobile Internet applications. In order to meet this increasing traffic, the International Telecommunication Union - Radiocommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-R) initiated in 2000 the process toward the next generation of International Mobile Telecommunications systems, referred to as IMT-Advanced systems.

5G use cases and system concept

In the 5G vision, access to information and sharing of data are possible anywhere and anytime to anyone and anything. 5G expands the usage of human-centric communications to include both human-centric and machine-centric communications. Mobile and wireless communication will increasingly become the primary way for humans and machines to access information and services. This will lead to socio-economic changes not yet imaginable, including improvements in productivity, sustainability, entertainment and well-being. To make this vision a reality, the capabilities of 5G systems must extend far beyond those of previous generations. 5G systems must exhibit greater flexibility than previous generations, and involve farther-reaching integration including not only the traditional radio access networks, but also core network, transport and application layers. Altogether, this requires a new way of thinking in 5G wireless access, network architecture and applications. In this chapter, first, the needs of the end users are described in terms of use cases and requirements, and then an overview of the 5G system concept meeting these user needs is given. Use cases and requirements This section provides the vision based on the expected societal development toward the year 2020 and beyond from the end-user perspective described in Chapter 1. Concrete use cases that have specific goals and challenges are provided. To achieve the goals and to overcome the challenges, there are certain specific requirements for 5G systems to meet. A collection of diverse use cases gives a set of challenging requirements that have to be fulfilled by 5G systems. The material below is largely based on [1]–[8]. The technical solutions to address these requirements are then discussed in the later chapters of this book. Use cases In this section, the most relevant 5G use cases are presented. Further, the challenges and requirements for each of these are named. As mentioned in Chapter 1, 5G will become a cornerstone in many of the economic sectors. Table 2.1 shows as an example how the addressed use cases map onto the major economic sectors. It should be noted that the list of use cases is far from being exhaustive. Only the most relevant ones from technical and business perspective are given. Finally, some of the use cases can be considered as a set of use cases (e.g. smart city or public safety).

The 5G radio-access technologies

The radio access for 5G will have to respond to a number of diverse requirements raised by a large variety of different new services, such as those from the context of massive Machine-Type Communication (mMTC) and ultra-reliable MTC (uMTC), as discussed in Chapter 2. Consequently, a “one-size-fits-all” solution for the air interface as prevalent in todays radio systems may no longer be the adequate choice in the future, as it can merely provide an inadequate compromise. Instead, the system should provide more flexibility and scalability to enable tailoring the system configurations to the service types and their demands. Moreover, as the data rates to be provided by mobile radio systems are ever increasing, technologies need to be devised to squeeze out the last bit from the scarce spectrum resources. This chapter elaborates on novel radio-access technologies addressing the aforementioned issues, which can be considered promising candidates for the 5G system. It is noteworthy that there has been flourishing work on potential radio-access technologies for 5G in recent time; refer to [1][2] for prominent research activities in the field. The chapter starts with a general introduction to the access design principles for multi-user communications in Section 7.1, which build the fundamentals for the novel access technologies presented in this chapter. Section 7.2 then presents novel multi-carrier waveforms based on filtering, which offer additional degrees of freedom in the system design to enable flexible system configurations. Novel non-orthogonal multiple-access schemes yielding an increased spectral efficiency are presented in Section 7.3. The following three sections then elaborate on radio access technologies and scalable solutions tailored for specific use cases, which are considered key drivers for 5G radio systems. Section 7.4 focuses on Ultra-Dense Networks (UDN), where also higher frequencies beyond 6 GHz are expected to be used. Section 7.5 presents an ad-hoc radio-access solution for the Vehicle-to-Anything (V2X) context, and finally Section 7.6 proposes schemes for the massive access of Machine-Type Communication (MTC) devices, characterized by a low amount of overhead and thus enabling an energy efficient transmission. Table 7.1 gives a brief overview on the radio-access technologies presented in this chapter, highlighting some of their characteristics and properties. It should be noted that the gathered information is not exhaustive and only the most important aspects are listed.

Machine-type communications

Introduction Machine-Type Communication (MTC) denotes the broad area of wireless communication with sensors, actuators, physical objects and other devices not directly operated by humans. Different types of radio access technologies are targeting MTC (see [1]). For Long Term Evolution (LTE), it has emerged as an important communication mode during the recent standard evolution. The research and development efforts made to enhance LTE in a way to support MTC clearly indicate the need for the wireless system architecture to address MTC. As the role of MTC is expected to grow in the future, there is a good opportunity in the development of a 5G wireless system to address MTC from the very beginning in the system design. This chapter is organized in the following way. Section 4.1 outlines some of the most important use cases for MTC and categorizes MTC into the groups of massive MTC (mMTC) and ultra-reliable and low-latency MTC (uMTC). The requirements for these two MTC categories are defined. Section 4.2 describes some fundamental techniques for MTC. Sections 4.3 and 4.4 address mMTC and uMTC respectively and explain the corresponding design principles and technology components. Section 4.5 summarizes the chapter. Use cases and categorization of MTC The general use case of low-rate MTC MTC use cases exist in a wide range of areas. They are mainly related to large numbers of sensors monitoring some system state or events, potentially with some form of actuation to control an environment. One example is automation of buildings and homes, where the state e.g. of the lighting, heating, ventilation and air condition, energy consumption, are observed and/or controlled. There are also wide area use cases, such as environmental monitoring over larger areas, monitoring of some infrastructure (e.g. roads, industrial environments, ports), available parking spaces in cities, management of object fleets (e.g. rental vehicles/bicycles), asset tracking in logistics, monitoring and assistance of patients. There are use cases that comprise remote areas, such as in smart agriculture. In the context of the use cases described in Chapter 2, MTC appears as an important, if not the crucial, element in (1) autonomous vehicle control, (3) factory cell automation, (6) massive amount of geographically spread devices, (10) smart city, (12) teleprotection in smart grid network and (15) smart logistics/remote control of industry applications.

The 5G architecture

Introduction The design of a mobile network architecture aims at defining network elements (e.g. Base Stations [BSs], switches, routers, user devices) and their interaction in order to ensure a consistent system operation. This chapter discusses basic considerations and provides an overview of current research activities. Network architecture can be considered from different angles that are needed in order to fulfill objectives like integration of technical components into an overall system, proper interworking of multi-vendor equipment and efficient design of physical networks from cost and performance point of view. As 5G systems have to integrate a plethora of partly contradicting requirements, enablers such as Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are to be applied in order to provide the needed flexibility of future networks, especially for the core network. Applying these tools may require a rethinking of some traditional aspects of network architecture design. This chapter will give the reader an impression of the most important topics influencing architecture design of future networks. NFV and SDN Todays operator networks include a large and increasing variety of hardware appliances. Launching new services often requires integration of complex hardware dedicated to the service including costly procedure design and is associated with lengthy time to market. On the other hand, hardware life cycles become shorter as technology and service innovation accelerates. At the end of 2012, network operators have started an initiative on NFV [1]. NFV aims at consolidating the variety of network equipment onto industry-standard high-volume servers. These servers can be located at the different network nodes as well as end-user premises. In this context, NFV relies upon but differs from traditional server virtualization. Unlike server virtualization, Virtualized Network Functions (VNF) may consist of one or more virtual machines running different software and processes in order to replace custom hardware appliances (Figure 3.1). As a rule, multiple VNFs are to be used in sequence in order to provide meaningful services to the customer. NFV requires an orchestration framework that enables proper instantiation, monitoring and operation of VNFs and Network Functions (NFs) (e.g. modulation, coding, multiple access, ciphering, etc.).