Millimeter wave (mmWave) signals experience orders-of-magnitude more pathloss than the microwave signals currently used in most wireless applications and all cellular systems. MmWave systems must therefore leverage large antenna arrays, made possible by the decrease in wavelength, to combat pathloss with beamforming gain. Beamforming with multiple data streams, known as precoding, can be used to further improve mmWave spectral efficiency. Both beamforming and precoding are done digitally at baseband in traditional multi-antenna systems. The high cost and power consumption of mixed-signal devices in mmWave systems, however, make analog processing in the RF domain more attractive. This hardware limitation restricts the feasible set of precoders and combiners that can be applied by practical mmWave transceivers. In this paper, we consider transmit precoding and receiver combining in mmWave systems with large antenna arrays. We exploit the spatial structure of mmWave channels to formulate the precoding/combining problem as a sparse reconstruction problem. Using the principle of basis pursuit, we develop algorithms that accurately approximate optimal unconstrained precoders and combiners such that they can be implemented in low-cost RF hardware. We present numerical results on the performance of the proposed algorithms and show that they allow mmWave systems to approach their unconstrained performance limits, even when transceiver hardware constraints are considered.

Spatially Sparse Precoding in Millimeter Wave MIMO Systems

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized mobile cloud computing toward mobile edge computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also discuss a set of issues, challenges, and future research directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

A Survey on Mobile Edge Computing: The Communication Perspective

Millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies between 30 and 300 GHz are a new frontier for cellular communication that offers the promise of orders of magnitude greater bandwidths combined with further gains via beamforming and spatial multiplexing from multielement antenna arrays. This paper surveys measurements and capacity studies to assess this technology with a focus on small cell deployments in urban environments. The conclusions are extremely encouraging; measurements in New York City at 28 and 73 GHz demonstrate that, even in an urban canyon environment, significant non-line-of-sight (NLOS) outdoor, street-level coverage is possible up to approximately 200 m from a potential low-power microcell or picocell base station. In addition, based on statistical channel models from these measurements, it is shown that mmW systems can offer more than an order of magnitude increase in capacity over current state-of-the-art 4G cellular networks at current cell densities. Cellular systems, however, will need to be significantly redesigned to fully achieve these gains. Specifically, the requirement of highly directional and adaptive transmissions, directional isolation between links, and significant possibilities of outage have strong implications on multiple access, channel structure, synchronization, and receiver design. To address these challenges, the paper discusses how various technologies including adaptive beamforming, multihop relaying, heterogeneous network architectures, and carrier aggregation can be leveraged in the mmW context.

Millimeter-Wave Cellular Wireless Networks: Potentials and Challenges

Driven by the visions of Internet of Things and 5G communications, recent years have seen a paradigm shift in mobile computing, from the centralized Mobile Cloud Computing towards Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). The main feature of MEC is to push mobile computing, network control and storage to the network edges (e.g., base stations and access points) so as to enable computation-intensive and latency-critical applications at the resource-limited mobile devices. MEC promises dramatic reduction in latency and mobile energy consumption, tackling the key challenges for materializing 5G vision. The promised gains of MEC have motivated extensive efforts in both academia and industry on developing the technology. A main thrust of MEC research is to seamlessly merge the two disciplines of wireless communications and mobile computing, resulting in a wide-range of new designs ranging from techniques for computation offloading to network architectures. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art MEC research with a focus on joint radio-and-computational resource management. We also present a research outlook consisting of a set of promising directions for MEC research, including MEC system deployment, cache-enabled MEC, mobility management for MEC, green MEC, as well as privacy-aware MEC. Advancements in these directions will facilitate the transformation of MEC from theory to practice. Finally, we introduce recent standardization efforts on MEC as well as some typical MEC application scenarios.

This article explores network densification as the key mechanism for wireless evolution over the next decade. Network densification includes densification over space (e.g, dense deployment of small cells) and frequency (utilizing larger portions of radio spectrum in diverse bands). Large-scale cost-effective spatial densification is facilitated by self-organizing networks and intercell interference management. Full benefits of network densification can be realized only if it is complemented by backhaul densification, and advanced receivers capable of interference cancellation.

Network densification: the dominant theme for wireless evolution into 5G

Techniques to implement MBMS services in a wireless communication system. In one aspect, a method is provided for processing data for transmission to a plurality of terminals. Frames of information bits (which may have variable rates) are provided to a buffer implementing a matrix. The matrix is padded with padding bits based on a particular padding scheme to support variable frame rates. The frames are then coded based on a particular block code to provide parity bits. The frame of information bits and the parity bits are then transmitted to the terminals. In another aspect, a method is provided for controlling the transmit power of a data transmission to a plurality of terminals. In accordance with the method, TPC streams are received from the terminals and processed to obtain a stream of joint power control commands used to adjust the transmit power of the data transmission.

Frame formatting, coding and transmit power control method for a multicast/broadcast system

Scheduling around frame based equipment (FBE) idle periods reduces the flexibility of scheduling and partitioning. This leads to a latency caused by waiting for the next downlink scheduling opportunity and skipping over unused uplink scheduling slots. According to certain aspects, to reduce overhead caused by idle time and ensure full downlink scheduling, a base station (BS) alternates between idle periods and channel occupancy time every fixed frame period with one or more other synchronized BSs, between components carriers of the BS, or both. Thus, a BS can always schedule downlink on a carrier during an idle period scheduled for a different BS and/or a different carrier.

Transmission diversity for FBE idle period handling

Methods, systems, and devices are described for supporting common reference signaling in wireless communications systems. Some configurations introduce a phase discontinuity between common reference signal (CRS) transmissions on different subframes. This may address issues that may arise when a reduced CRS periodicity is utilized. Indicators may also be transmitted from base stations to user equipment (UEs) to indicate whether phase continuity may be assumed or not. Some configurations may support CRS sequence initialization. These tools and techniques may utilize an extended CRS sequence periodicity, which may increase the number of CRS sequences transmitted by a cell.

Common reference signal phase discontinuity

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an uplink (UL) frame structure for wireless communication.SOLUTION: Resource blocks capable of being used for an uplink (UL) are sectioned into a data section and a control section. The control section is formed at both ends of system bandwidth and has a configurable size. The data section includes all resource blocks that are not included in the control section. For at least one sub-frame, decided is information on use of a code division multiplexing (CDM) and frequency division multiplexing (FDM) structure for multiplexing data on a data channel of the uplink. Furthermore, on the basis of the determined information, data is multiplexed for at least one sub-frame by use of the CDM and FDM structure.

Yongbin Wei

Papers

Frame formatting, coding and transmit power control method for a multicast/broadcast system

Transmission diversity for FBE idle period handling

Common reference signal phase discontinuity

Consecutive cdm/fdm structure for lte uplink data

Coexistence between spectrum sharing systems and asynchronous channel access systems