Wireless Communications

What will 5G be? What it will not be is an incremental advance on 4G. The previous four generations of cellular technology have each been a major paradigm shift that has broken backward compatibility. Indeed, 5G will need to be a paradigm shift that includes very high carrier frequencies with massive bandwidths, extreme base station and device densities, and unprecedented numbers of antennas. However, unlike the previous four generations, it will also be highly integrative: tying any new 5G air interface and spectrum together with LTE and WiFi to provide universal high-rate coverage and a seamless user experience. To support this, the core network will also have to reach unprecedented levels of flexibility and intelligence, spectrum regulation will need to be rethought and improved, and energy and cost efficiencies will become even more critical considerations. This paper discusses all of these topics, identifying key challenges for future research and preliminary 5G standardization activities, while providing a comprehensive overview of the current literature, and in particular of the papers appearing in this special issue.

What Will 5G Be

Wireless sensor networks consist of small nodes with sensing, computation, and wireless communications capabilities. Many routing, power management, and data dissemination protocols have been specifically designed for WSNs where energy awareness is an essential design issue. Routing protocols in WSNs might differ depending on the application and network architecture. In this article we present a survey of state-of-the-art routing techniques in WSNs. We first outline the design challenges for routing protocols in WSNs followed by a comprehensive survey of routing techniques. Overall, the routing techniques are classified into three categories based on the underlying network structure: flit, hierarchical, and location-based routing. Furthermore, these protocols can be classified into multipath-based, query-based, negotiation-based, QoS-based, and coherent-based depending on the protocol operation. We study the design trade-offs between energy and communication overhead savings in every routing paradigm. We also highlight the advantages and performance issues of each routing technique. The article concludes with possible future research areas.

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Routing techniques in wireless sensor networks: a survey

New research directions will lead to fundamental changes in the design of future fifth generation (5G) cellular networks. This article describes five technologies that could lead to both architectural and component disruptive design changes: device-centric architectures, millimeter wave, massive MIMO, smarter devices, and native support for machine-to-machine communications. The key ideas for each technology are described, along with their potential impact on 5G and the research challenges that remain.

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Five disruptive technology directions for 5G

It is shown that, particularly for terrestrial cellular telephony, the interference-suppression feature of CDMA (code division multiple access) can result in a many-fold increase in capacity over analog and even over competing digital techniques. A single-cell system, such as a hubbed satellite network, is addressed, and the basic expression for capacity is developed. The corresponding expressions for a multiple-cell system are derived. and the distribution on the number of users supportable per cell is determined. It is concluded that properly augmented and power-controlled multiple-cell CDMA promises a quantum increase in current cellular capacity. >

On the capacity of a cellular CDMA system

A major challenge in the operation of wireless communications systems is the efficient use of radio resources. One important component of radio resource management is power control, which has been studied extensively in the context of voice communications. With the increasing demand for wireless data services, it is necessary to establish power control algorithms for information sources other than voice. We present a power control solution for wireless data in the analytical setting of a game theoretic framework. In this context, the quality of service (QoS) a wireless terminal receives is referred to as the utility and distributed power control is a noncooperative power control game where users maximize their utility. The outcome of the game results in a Nash (1951) equilibrium that is inefficient. We introduce pricing of transmit powers in order to obtain Pareto improvement of the noncooperative power control game, i.e., to obtain improvements in user utilities relative to the case with no pricing. Specifically, we consider a pricing function that is a linear function of the transmit power. The simplicity of the pricing function allows a distributed implementation where the price can be broadcast by the base station to all the terminals. We see that pricing is especially helpful in a heavily loaded system.

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Efficient power control via pricing in wireless data networks

Single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC FDMA), a modified form of orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA), is a promising technique for high data rate uplink communications in future cellular systems. SC-FDMA has similar throughput performance and essentially the same overall complexity as OFDMA. A principal advantage of SC-FDMA is the peak-to-average power ratio (PARR), which is lower than that of OFDMA. SC FDMA is currently a strong candidate for the uplink multiple access scheme in the long term evolution of cellular systems under consideration by the third generation partnership project (3GPP). In this paper, we give an overview of SC-FDMA. We also analyze the effects of subcarrier mapping on throughput and PARR. Among the possible subcarrier mapping approaches, we find that localized FDMA (LFDMA) with channel-dependent scheduling (CDS) results in higher throughput than interleaved FDMA (JFDMA). However, the PARR performance of IFDMA is better than that of LFDMA. As in other communications systems there are complex tradeoffs between design parameters and performance in an SC-FDMA system

Single carrier FDMA for uplink wireless transmission

Simulation work is reported indicating that packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) allows a variety of information sources to share the same wireless access channel. Some of the sources, such as speech terminals, are classified as periodic and others, such as signaling, are classified as random. Packets from all sources contend for access to channel time slots. When a periodic information terminal succeeds in gaining access, it reserves subsequent time slots for uncontested transmission. Both computer simulations and a listening test reveal that PRMA achieves a promising combination of voice quality and bandwidth efficiency. >

Packet reservation multiple access for local wireless communications

With cellular phones mass-market consumer items, the next frontier is mobile multimedia communications. This situation raises the question of how to perform power control for information sources other than voice. To explore this issue, we use the concepts and mathematics of microeconomics and game theory. In this context, the quality of service of a telephone call is referred to as the "utility" and the distributed power control problem for a CDMA telephone is a "noncooperative game." The power control algorithm corresponds to a strategy that has a locally optimum operating point referred to as a "Nash equilibrium." The telephone power control algorithm is also "Pareto efficient," in the terminology of game theory. When we apply the same approach to power control in wireless data transmissions, we find that the corresponding strategy, while locally optimum, is not Pareto efficient. Relative to the telephone algorithm, there are other algorithms that produce higher utility for at least one terminal, without decreasing the utility for any other terminal. This article presents one such algorithm. The algorithm includes a price function proportional to transmitter power. When terminals adjust their power levels to maximize the net utility (utility-price), they arrive at lower power levels and higher utility than they achieve when they individually strive to maximize utility.

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Power control for wireless data

Equilibrium point analysis is used to evaluate system behavior in a packet reservation multiple access (PRMA) protocol based network. The authors derive the probability of packet dropping given the number of simultaneous conversations. The authors establish conditions for system stability and efficiency. Numerical calculations based on the theory show close agreement with computer simulations. They also provide valuable guides to system design. Because PRMA is a statistical multiplexer, the channel becomes congested when too many terminals are active. For a particular example it is shown that speech activity detection permits 37 speech terminals to share a PRMA channel with 20 slots per frame, with a packet dropping probability of less than 1%. >

David J. Goodman

Papers

Efficient power control via pricing in wireless data networks

Single carrier FDMA for uplink wireless transmission

Packet reservation multiple access for local wireless communications

Power control for wireless data

Performance of PRMA: a packet voice protocol for cellular systems