George Koudouridis

SECRET — Secure network coding for reduced energy next generation mobile small cells: A European Training Network in wireless communications and networking for 5G

SECRET is a collaborative European Training Network (ETN) committed to create an excellent educational training platform for Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) in the field of wireless communications and networking for 5G. The project is recently funded by the European Commission under the H2020 research and innovation program, through the Marie Curie People Program. This project targets to narrow the gap between current networking technologies and the foreseen requirements of future 2020 networking, through the recruitment and training of 17 ESRs. SECRET aims to strike a note by delivering higher capacity, ability to support more users, and lowering the cost per bit by adopting technology trends widely accepted to form part of the 5G roadmap, through the deployment of new disruptive “femtocell” type cells on demand, to what we refer to as mobile small cells. This will be complemented by a wireless high-speed fronthaul to bridge the small cell network to the core. Moreover, novel techniques will be investigated, including “network coding”, “cooperation”, and “energy-aware smart front-end”. Additionally, due to the confidential information that will be communicated over in future networks, a lightweight security framework built on secure network coding will be proposed.

Joint tracking of groups of users with uplink reference signals

In cellular networks user equipment (UE) need to be tracked so that they can be reached by incoming data and to keep context information such as encryption keys available for UE originated transmission. Typically UEs measure reference signal transmissions that are broadcasted by the network, and report to the network based on some criterion that allows the network to know the UE location with sufficient accuracy. An alternative approach is to let the UEs send out reference signals that the network can detect to track the UE location. This reduces the need for the UEs to measure and report, while it requires some resources for uplink transmission. In this paper we propose and evaluate a solution for jointly tracking groups of UEs that are moving together. The results show that UEs can be tracked efficiently with low resource consumption.

Multi-dimensional radio service maps for position-based self-organized networks

Increasing spectral and energy efficiency in future networks requires flexible and timely allocation of radio resources along multiple dimensions including frequency, time and space. Although this multi-dimensionality offers additional degrees of freedom, it however comes at the cost of higher complexity. To this end, it is envisaged that spatial information associated with user resource allocation will provide a means for an efficient utilization of a dense radio access network (RAN) infrastructure in a proactive and self-optimized manner. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that aims at the utilization of multi-dimensional (MD) radio service maps (RSM) for storing and exploiting position-based information. Requirements, key concepts and functions are described. The potential gains in energy consumption and efficiency of the radio service maps are shown by means of numerical results for an ultra-dense network deployment scenario.