Mischa Dohler

Relay-based deployment concepts for wireless and mobile broadband radio

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in multihop-augmented infrastructure-based networks in both the industry and academia, such as the seed concept in 3GPP, mesh networks in IEEE 802.16, and converge extension of HiperLAN/2 through relays or user-cooperative diversity mesh networks. This article, a synopsis of numerous contributions to the working group 4 of the wireless world research forum and other research work, presents an overview of important topics and applications in the context of relaying. It covers different approaches to exploiting the benefits of multihop communications via relays, such as solutions for radio range extension in mobile and wireless broadband cellular networks (trading range for capacity), and solutions to combat shadowing at high radio frequencies. Furthermore, relaying is presented as a means to reduce infrastructure deployment costs. It is also shown that through the exploitation of spatial diversity, multihop relaying can enhance capacity in cellular networks. We wish to emphasize that while this article focuses on fixed relays, many of the concepts presented can also be applied to systems with moving relays.

Load & backhaul aware decoupled downlink/uplink access in 5G systems

Until the 4th Generation (4G) cellular 3GPP systems, a user equipments (UE) cell association has been based on the downlink received power from the strongest base station. Recent work has shown that - with an increasing degree of heterogeneity in emerging 5G systems - such an approach is dramatically suboptimal, advocating for an independent association of the downlink and uplink where the downlink is served by the macro cell and the uplink by the nearest small cell. In this paper, we advance prior art by explicitly considering the cell-load as well as the available backhaul capacity during the association process. We introduce a novel association algorithm and prove its superiority w.r.t. prior art by means of simulations that are based on Vodafones small cell trial network and employing a high resolution pathloss prediction and realistic user distributions. We also study the effect that different power control settings have on the performance of our algorithm.

MAC Essentials for Wireless Sensor Networks

The wireless medium being inherently broadcast in nature and hence prone to interferences requires highly optimized medium access control (MAC) protocols. This holds particularly true for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of a large amount of miniaturized battery-powered wireless networked sensors required to operate for years with no human intervention. There has hence been a growing interest on understanding and optimizing WSN MAC protocols in recent years, where the limited and constrained resources have driven research towards primarily reducing energy consumption of MAC functionalities. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive state-of-the-art study in which we thoroughly expose the prime focus of WSN MAC protocols, design guidelines that inspired these protocols, as well as drawbacks and shortcomings of the existing solutions and how existing and emerging technology will influence future solutions. In contrast to previous surveys that focused on classifying MAC protocols according to the technique being used, we provide a thematic taxonomy in which protocols are classified according to the problems dealt with. We also show that a key element in selecting a suitable solution for a particular situation is mainly driven by the statistical properties of the generated traffic.

Standardized Protocol Stack for the Internet of (Important) Things

We have witnessed the Fixed Internet emerging with virtually every computer being connected today; we are currently witnessing the emergence of the Mobile Internet with the exponential explosion of smart phones, tablets and net-books. However, both will be dwarfed by the anticipated emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), in which everyday objects are able to connect to the Internet, tweet or be queried. Whilst the impact onto economies and societies around the world is undisputed, the technologies facilitating such a ubiquitous connectivity have struggled so far and only recently commenced to take shape. To this end, this paper introduces in a timely manner and for the first time the wireless communications stack the industry believes to meet the important criteria of power-efficiency, reliability and Internet connectivity. Industrial applications have been the early adopters of this stack, which has become the de-facto standard, thereby bootstrapping early IoT developments with already thousands of wireless nodes deployed. Corroborated throughout this paper and by emerging industry alliances, we believe that a standardized approach, using latest developments in the IEEE 802.15.4 and IETF working groups, is the only way forward. We introduce and relate key embodiments of the power-efficient IEEE 802.15.4-2006 PHY layer, the power-saving and reliable IEEE 802.15.4e MAC layer, the IETF 6LoWPAN adaptation layer enabling universal Internet connectivity, the IETF ROLL routing protocol enabling availability, and finally the IETF CoAP enabling seamless transport and support of Internet applications. The protocol stack proposed in the present work converges towards the standardized notations of the ISO/OSI and TCP/IP stacks. What thus seemed impossible some years back, i.e., building a clearly defined, standards-compliant and Internet-compliant stack given the extreme restrictions of IoT networks, is commencing to become reality.

Radio resource allocation in LTE-advanced cellular networks with M2M communications

Machine-to-machine (M2M) communications are expected to provide ubiquitous connectivity between machines without the need of human intervention. To support such a large number of autonomous devices, the M2M system architecture needs to be extremely power and spectrally efficient. This article thus briefly reviews the features of M2M services in the third generation (3G) long-term evolution and its advancement (LTE-Advanced) networks. Architectural enhancements are then presented for supporting M2M services in LTE-Advanced cellular networks. To increase spectral efficiency, the same spectrum is expected to be utilized for human-to- human (H2H) communications as well as M2M communications. We therefore present various radio resource allocation schemes and quantify their utility in LTE-Advanced cellular networks. System-level simulation results are provided to validate the performance effectiveness of M2M communications in LTE-Advanced cellular networks.

Distributed Turbo Coding With Soft Information Relaying in Multihop Relay Networks

It has been shown that distributed turbo coding (DTC) can approach the capacity of a wireless relay network. In the existing DTC schemes, it is usually assumed that error-free decoding is performed at a relay. We refer to this type of DTC schemes as perfect DTC. In this paper, we propose a novel DTC scheme. For the proposed scheme, instead of making a decision on the transmitted information symbols at the relay as in perfect DTC, we calculate and forward the corresponding soft information. We derive parity symbol soft estimates for the interleaved source information when only the a posteriori probabilities of the information symbols are known. The results show that the proposed scheme can effectively mitigate error propagation due to erroneous decoding at the relay. Simulation results also confirm that the proposed scheme approaches the outage probability bound of a distributed two-hop relay network at high signal-to-noise ratios

MIMO systems with adaptive modulation

Adaptive modulation (AM) schemes in multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems with a perfect or imperfect channel state information (CSI) at both the transmitter and receiver were investigated. Under an average transmit power and instantaneous bit error rate (BER) constraint, the transmit parameters including the subchannel transmit power and/or spectral efficiency are optimally adapted in the spatial and/or temporal domain to maximize the average spectral efficiency (ASE). Two categories, the continuous rate and discrete rate, of adaptive systems were considered, where the derived asymptotic closed form expressions for the former provided much insight into the latter. Analytical and numerical results showed that a full multiplexing gain was achieved in variable rate variable power (VRVP) systems and variable rate (VR) systems. Variable power (VP) systems with unequal numbers of transmit and receive antennas also achieved the full multiplexing gain, unlike VP systems with equal number of transmit and receive antennas. The effect of CSI imperfection on the ASE and BER was evaluated for VR systems and closed form expressions for the ASE and BER were obtained. They prove to be a useful tool to assess the system performance without taking time consuming AM MIMO system simulations.

Internet of Things in the 5G Era: Enablers, Architecture, and Business Models

The IoT paradigm holds the promise to revolutionize the way we live and work by means of a wealth of new services, based on seamless interactions between a large amount of heterogeneous devices. After decades of conceptual inception of the IoT, in recent years a large variety of communication technologies has gradually emerged, reflecting a large diversity of application domains and of communication requirements. Such heterogeneity and fragmentation of the connectivity landscape is currently hampering the full realization of the IoT vision, by posing several complex integration challenges. In this context, the advent of 5G cellular systems, with the availability of a connectivity technology, which is at once truly ubiquitous, reliable, scalable, and cost-efficient, is considered as a potentially key driver for the yet-to emerge global IoT. In the present paper, we analyze in detail the potential of 5G technologies for the IoT, by considering both the technological and standardization aspects. We review the present-day IoT connectivity landscape, as well as the main 5G enablers for the IoT. Last but not least, we illustrate the massive business shifts that a tight link between IoT and 5G may cause in the operator and vendors ecosystem.

A resource allocation strategy for distributed MIMO multi-hop communication systems

An extended form of multi-hop communication systems is introduced which allows the application of multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) capacity enhancement techniques over spatially separated relaying mobile terminals to drastically increase end-to-end capacity. An explicit resource allocation strategy is deduced in terms of fractional bandwidth and power allocations to each relaying hop over ergodic Rayleigh flat fading channels employing orthogonal frequency-division multiple-access (FDMA)-based relaying.

From MANET To IETF ROLL Standardization: A Paradigm Shift in WSN Routing Protocols

In large networks, a data source may not reach the intended sink in a single hop, thereby requiring the traffic to be routed via multiple hops. An optimized choice of such routing path is known to significantly increase the performance of said networks. This holds particularly true for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consisting of a large amount of miniaturized battery-powered wireless networked sensors required to operate for years with no human intervention. There has hence been a growing interest on understanding and optimizing WSN routing and networking protocols in recent years, where the limited and constrained resources have driven research towards primarily reducing energy consumption, memory requirements and complexity of routing functionalities. To this end, early flooding-based and hierarchical protocols have migrated within the past decade to geographic and self-organizing coordinate-based routing solutions. The former have been brought to standardization through the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) working group; the latter are currently finding their way into standardization through the IETF Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks (ROLL) working group. This article thus surveys this paradigm shift for routing in WSNs and, unlike previous milestone surveys, follows a rather chronological organization within the given protocol taxonomy. For each protocol family, we provide a didactic presentation of the basic concept, a discussion on the enhancements and variants on that concept, and a detailed description of the latest state-of-the-art protocols of that family. We believe that this organization sheds some light on the design choices of emerging IETF ROLL protocols and also provides design parameters of interest to the WSN engineer, essentially enabling the design and implementation of more reliable and efficient WSN solutions.