Geoffrey Ye Li

Fundamental trade-offs on green wireless networks

Traditional mobile wireless network mainly design focuses on ubiquitous access and large capacity. However, as energy saving and environmental protection become global demands and inevitable trends, wireless researchers and engineers need to shift their focus to energy-efficiency-oriented design, that is, green radio. In this article, we propose a framework for green radio research and integrate the fundamental issues that are currently scattered. The skeleton of the framework consists of four fundamental tradeoffs: deployment efficiency-energy efficiency, spectrum efficiency-energy efficiency, bandwidth-power, and delay-power. With the help of the four fundamental trade-offs, we demonstrate that key network performance/cost indicators are all strung together.

An Overview of Massive MIMO: Benefits and Challenges

Presents a list of articles published by the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) that ranked among the top 100 most downloaded IEEE Xplore articles.Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications refers to the idea equipping cellular base stations (BSs) with a very large number of antennas, and has been shown to potentially allow for orders of magnitude improvement in spectral and energy efficiency using relatively simple (linear) processing. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art research on the topic, which has recently attracted considerable attention. We begin with an information theoretic analysis to illustrate the conjectured advantages of massive MIMO, and then we address implementation issues related to channel estimation, detection and precoding schemes. We particularly focus on the potential impact of pilot contamination caused by the use of non-orthogonal pilot sequences by users in adjacent cells. We also analyze the energy efficiency achieved by massive MIMO systems, and demonstrate how the degrees of freedom provided by massive MIMO systems enable efficient single-carrier transmission. Finally, the challenges and opportunities associated with implementing massive MIMO in future wireless communications systems are discussed.

Cognitive radio networking and communications: an overview

Cognitive radio (CR) is the enabling technology for supporting dynamic spectrum access: the policy that addresses the spectrum scarcity problem that is encountered in many countries. Thus, CR is widely regarded as one of the most promising technologies for future wireless communications. To make radios and wireless networks truly cognitive, however, is by no means a simple task, and it requires collaborative effort from various research communities, including communications theory, networking engineering, signal processing, game theory, software-hardware joint design, and reconfigurable antenna and radio-frequency design. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview on CR networking and communications by looking at the key functions of the physical (PHY), medium access control (MAC), and network layers involved in a CR design and how these layers are crossly related. In particular, for the PHY layer, we will address signal processing techniques for spectrum sensing, cooperative spectrum sensing, and transceiver design for cognitive spectrum access. For the MAC layer, we review sensing scheduling schemes, sensing-access tradeoff design, spectrum-aware access MAC, and CR MAC protocols. In the network layer, cognitive radio network (CRN) tomography, spectrum-aware routing, and quality-of-service (QoS) control will be addressed. Emerging CRNs that are actively developed by various standardization committees and spectrum-sharing economics will also be reviewed. Finally, we point out several open questions and challenges that are related to the CRN design.

A survey of energy-efficient wireless communications

Reducing energy consumption in wireless communications has attracted increasing attention recently. Advanced physical layer techniques such as multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), cognitive radio, network coding, cooperative communication, etc.; new network architectures such as heterogeneous networks, distributed antennas, multi-hop cellulars, etc.; as well as radio and network resource management schemes such as various cross-layer optimization algorithms, dynamic power saving, multiple radio access technologies coordination, etc. have been proposed to address this issue. In this article, we overview these technologies and present the state-of-the-art on each aspect. Some challenges that need to be solved in the area are also described.

Energy-efficient wireless communications: tutorial, survey, and open issues

With explosive growth of high-data-rate applications, more and more energy is consumed in wireless networks to guarantee quality of service. Therefore, energy-efficient communications have been paid increasing attention under the background of limited energy resource and environmental- friendly transmission behaviors. In this article, basic concepts of energy-efficient communications are first introduced and then existing fundamental works and advanced techniques for energy efficiency are summarized, including information-theoretic analysis, OFDMA networks, MIMO techniques, relay transmission, and resource allocation for signaling. Some valuable topics in energy-efficient design are also identified for future research.

Signal Processing in Cognitive Radio

Cognitive radio allows for usage of licensed frequency bands by unlicensed users. However, these unlicensed (cognitive) users need to monitor the spectrum continuously to avoid possible interference with the licensed (primary) users. Apart from this, cognitive radio is expected to learn from its surroundings and perform functions that best serve its users. Such an adaptive technology naturally presents unique signal-processing challenges. In this paper, we describe the fundamental signal-processing aspects involved in developing a fully functional cognitive radio network, including spectrum sensing and spectrum sculpting.

Device-to-Device Communications Underlaying Cellular Networks

In cellular networks, proximity users may communicate directly without going through the base station, which is called Device-to-device (D2D) communications and it can improve spectral efficiency. However, D2D communications may generate interference to the existing cellular networks if not designed properly. In this paper, we study a resource allocation problem to maximize the overall network throughput while guaranteeing the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements for both D2D users and regular cellular users (CUs). A three-step scheme is proposed. It first performs admission control and then allocates powers for each admissible D2D pair and its potential CU partners. Next, a maximum weight bipartite matching based scheme is developed to select a suitable CU partner for each admissible D2D pair to maximize the overall network throughput. Numerical results show that the proposed scheme can significantly improve the performance of the hybrid system in terms of D2D access rate and the overall network throughput. The performance of D2D communications depends on D2D user locations, cell radius, the numbers of active CUs and D2D pairs, and the maximum power constraint for the D2D pairs.

Distributed Interference-Aware Energy-Efficient Power Optimization

Power optimization techniques are becoming increasingly important in wireless system design since battery technology has not kept up with the demand of mobile devices. They are also critical to interference management in wireless systems because interference usually results from both aggressive spectral reuse and high power transmission and severely limits system performance. In this paper, we develop an energy-efficient power optimization scheme for interference-limited wireless communications. We consider both circuit and transmission powers and focus on energy efficiency over throughput. We first investigate a non-cooperative game for energy-efficient power optimization in frequency-selective channels and reveal the conditions of the existence and uniqueness of the equilibrium for this game. Most importantly, we discover a sufficient condition for generic multi-channel power control to have a unique equilibrium in frequency-selective channels. Then we study the tradeoff between energy efficiency and spectral efficiency and show by simulation results that the proposed scheme improves both energy efficiency and spectral efficiency in an interference-limited multi-cell cellular network.

Simplified Relay Selection and Power Allocation in Cooperative Cognitive Radio Systems

In this paper, we investigate joint relay selection and power allocation to maximize system throughput with limited interference to licensed (primary) users in cognitive radio (CR) systems. As these two problems are coupled together, we first develop an optimal approach based on the dual method and then propose a suboptimal approach to reduce complexity while maintaining reasonable performance. From our simulation results, the proposed approaches can increase the system throughput by over 50%.

Device-to-device communications in cellular networks

Device-to-device communications enable two proximity users to transmit signal directly without going through the base station. It can increase network spectral efficiency and energy efficiency, reduce transmission delay, offload traffic for the BS, and alleviate congestion in the cellular core networks. However, many technical challenges need to be addressed for D2D communications to harvest the potential benefits, including device discovery and D2D session setup, D2D resource allocation to guarantee QoS, D2D MIMO transmission, as well as D2D-aided BS deployment in heterogeneous networks. In this article, the basic concepts of D2D communications are first introduced, and then existing fundamental works on D2D communications are discussed. In addition, some potential research topics and challenges are also identified.