Eleftherios Karipidis

Spectrum sharing improves the network efficiency for cellular operators

The article describes the potential gain by spectrum sharing between cellular operators in terms of network efficiency. The focus of the study is on a specific resource sharing scenario: spectrum sharing between two operators in cellular downlink transmission. If frequency bands are allocated dynamically and exclusively to one operator - a case called orthogonal spectrum sharing - significant gains in terms of achievable throughput (spectrum sharing gains between 50 percent and 100 percent) and user satisfaction are reported for asymmetric scenarios at link and system level as well as from two hardware demonstrators. Additionally, if frequency bands are allocated simultaneously to two operators - a case called non-orthogonal spectrum sharing - further gains are reported. In order to achieve these, different enablers from hardware technologies and base station capabilities are required. However, we argue that all requirements are fulfilled in 3GPP and newer mobile standards. Therefore, the results and conclusions of this overview article encourage to seriously consider the inter-operator spectrum sharing technologies.

Selfishness and altruism on the MISO interference channel: the case of partial transmitter CSI

We study the achievable ergodic rate region of the two-user multiple-input single-output interference channel, under the assumptions that the receivers treat interference as additive Gaussian noise and the transmitters only have statistical channel knowledge. Initially, we provide a closed-form expression for the ergodic rates and derive the Nash-equilibrium and zero-forcing transmit beamforming strategies. Then, we show that combinations of the aforementioned selfish and altruistic, respectively, strategies achieve Pareto-optimal rate pairs.

Pilot aided channel estimation for OFDM: a separated approach for smoothing and interpolation

In this paper pilot aided channel estimation (PACE) for OFDM is addressed. For PACE equidistantly spaced pilot symbols allow to reconstruct the channel response by means of interpolation. The optimum minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimator performs smoothing and interpolation jointly. To reduce the complexity of the optimum MMSE estimator, we propose to separate the smoothing and interpolation tasks. The separated smoothing and interpolation estimator (SINE) consists of a MMSE based smoother which only operates at the received pilot symbols, and an interpolator which is independent of the channel statistics. We show that the separated approach gets close to the optimum MMSE, while the complexity is grossly reduced. However, at high SNR an error floor is observed, which is caused by edge effects, i.e. subcarriers near the beginning and end of the band suffer from an increased interpolation error.

On Optimal Link Activation With Interference Cancelation in Wireless Networking

A fundamental aspect in performance engineering of wireless networks is optimizing the set of links that can be concurrently activated to meet given signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) thresholds. The solution of this combinatorial problem is the key element in scheduling and cross-layer resource management. In this paper, we assume multiuser decoding (MUD) receivers, which can cancel strongly interfering signals. As a result, in contrast to classical spatial reuse, links being close to each other are more likely to be active concurrently. Our focus is to gauge the gain of successive interference cancelation (SIC) and the simpler, yet instructive, case of parallel interference cancelation (PIC) in the context of optimal link activation (LA). We show that both problems are NP-hard, and we develop compact integer linear programming (ILP) formulations to approach global optimality. We provide an extensive numerical performance evaluation, indicating that, for low to medium SINR thresholds, the improvement is quite substantial, particularly with SIC, whereas for high SINR thresholds, the improvement diminishes, and both schemes perform equally well.

Mitigating Pilot Contamination by Pilot Reuse and Power Control Schemes for Massive MIMO Systems

The performance of massive multiple input multiple output systems may be limited by inter-cell pilot contamination (PC) unless appropriate PC mitigation or avoidance schemes are employed. In this paper we develop techniques based on existing long term evolution (LTE) measurements - open loop power control (OLPC) and pilot sequence reuse schemes, that avoid PC within a group of cells. We compare the performance of simple least-squares channel estimator with the higher-complexity minimum mean square error estimator, and evaluate the performance of the recently proposed coordinated pilot allocation (CPA) technique (which is appropriate in cooperative systems). The performance measures of interest include the normalized mean square error of channel estimation, the downlink signal-to-interference-plus-noise and spectral efficiency when employing maximum ratio transmission or zero forcing precoding at the base station. We find that for terminals moving at vehicular speeds, PC can be effectively mitigated in an operation and maintenance node using both the OLPC and the pilot reuse schemes. Additionally, greedy CPA provides performance gains only for a fraction of terminals, at the cost of degradation for the rest of the terminals and higher complexity. These results indicate that in practice, PC may be effectively mitigated without the need for second-order channel statistics or inter-cell cooperation.

Closed-form parameterization of the Pareto boundary for the two-user MISO interference channel

In this paper, we study an achievable rate region of the two-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel. We find the transmit beamforming vectors that achieve Pareto-optimal points. We do so, by deriving a sufficient condition for Pareto optimality. Given the beamforming vector of one transmitter, this condition enables us to determine the beamforming vector of the other transmitter that forms a Pareto-optimal pair. The latter can be done in closed form by solving a cubic equation. The result is validated against state-of-the-art methods via numerical illustrations.

Capacity gains due to orthogonal spectrum sharing in multi-operator LTE cellular networks

Static spectrum allocation leads to resource wastage and inter-operator spectrum sharing is a possible way to improve spectrum efficiency. In this work, we assume that two cellular network operators agree upon sharing part of their spectrum, which can then be dynamically accessed by either of them in a mutually exclusive way. Our goal is to numerically assess the gain, in terms of cell capacity, due to such orthogonal spectrum sharing. Hence, we propose a centralized algorithm that performs coordinated scheduling, in order to numerically evaluate an upper bound on the achievable sum capacity. The algorithm is centralized and exploits complete information on both networks to perform the optimum allocation. The simulation results illustrate the impact of the multiuser diversity and the asymmetry in the traffic load among the networks on the overall achievable gain.

Pareto-optimal beamforming for the MISO interference channel with partial CSI

We consider the problem of finding Pareto-optimal (PO) operating points for the multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel when the transmitters have statistical (covariance) channel knowledge. We devise a computationally efficient algorithm, based on semidefinite relaxation, to compute the PO rates and the enabling beamforming vectors. We illustrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by a numerical example.

Outage rate regions for the MISO IFC

We consider the two-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel (IFC) and assume that the receivers treat the interference as additive Gaussian noise. We study the rates that can be achieved in a slow-fading scenario, allowing an outage probability. We introduce three definitions for the outage region of the IFC. The definitions differ on whether the rates are declared in outage jointly or individually and whether there is perfect or statistical information about the channels. Even for the broadcast and the multiple-access channels, which are special cases of the IFC, there exist several definitions of the outage rate regions. We provide interpretations of the definitions and compare the corresponding regions via numerical simulations. Also, we discuss methods for finding the regions. This includes a characterization of the beamforming strategies, which are optimal in the sense that achieve rate pairs on the Pareto boundary of the outage rate region.

Mixed-integer linear programming framework for max-min power control with single-stage interference cancellation

We consider a wireless network comprising a number of mutually-interfering links. We study the transmit power control problem that determines the egalitarian signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio under a novel setup. Namely, we assume that the receivers have multiuser detection capability, which enables decoding and cancellation of the interference, when it is strong enough. Determining the interference terms that can be cancelled is a combinatorial problem, which is intertwined with the power control problem. We propose a mixed-integer linear programming framework that jointly solves these problems optimally, using off-the-shelf algorithms. We illustrate with a simulation result the merit of the novel approach against the conventional one that precludes interference cancellation.