This paper presents a tutorial on stochastic geometry (SG)-based analysis for cellular networks. This tutorial is distinguished by its depth with respect to wireless communication details and its focus on cellular networks. This paper starts by modeling and analyzing the baseband interference in a baseline single-tier downlink cellular network with single antenna base stations and universal frequency reuse. Then, it characterizes signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio and its related performance metrics. In particular, a unified approach to conduct error probability, outage probability, and transmission rate analysis is presented. Although the main focus of this paper is on cellular networks, the presented unified approach applies for other types of wireless networks that impose interference protection around receivers. This paper then extends the unified approach to capture cellular network characteristics (e.g., frequency reuse, multiple antenna, power control, etc.). It also presents numerical examples associated with demonstrations and discussions. To this end, this paper highlights the state-of-the-art research and points out future research directions.
Timely message delivery is a key enabler for Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems to support wide range of context-dependent applications. Conventional time-related metrics (e.g. delay and jitter) fails to characterize the timeliness of the system update. Age of information (AoI) is a time-evolving metric that accounts for the packet inter-arrival and waiting times to assess the freshness of information. In the foreseen large-scale IoT networks, mutual interference imposes a delicate relation between traffic generation patterns and transmission delays. To this end, we provide a spatiotemporal framework that captures the peak AoI (PAoI) for large scale IoT uplink network under time-triggered (TT) and event triggered (ET) traffic. Tools from stochastic geometry and queueing theory are utilized to account for the macroscopic and microscopic network scales. Simulations are conducted to validate the proposed mathematical framework and assess the effect of traffic load on the PAoI. The results unveil a counter-intuitive superiority of the ET traffic over the TT in terms of PAoI, which is due to the involved temporal interference correlations. Insights regarding the network stability frontiers and the location-dependent performance are presented. Key design recommendations regarding the traffic load and decoding thresholds are highlighted.
Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) is promoted as a key component of 5G cellular networks. As the name implies, NOMA operation introduces intracell interference (i.e., interference arising within the cell) to the cellular operation. The intracell interference is managed by careful NOMA design (e.g., user clustering and resource allocation) along with successive interference cancellation. However, most of the proposed NOMA designs are agnostic to intercell interference (i.e., interference from outside the cell), which is a major performance limiting parameter in 5G networks. This paper sheds light on the drastic negative-impact of intercell interference on the NOMA performance and advocates interference-aware NOMA design that jointly accounts for both intracell and intercell interference. To this end, a case study for fair NOMA operation is presented and intercell interference mitigation techniques for NOMA networks are discussed. This paper also investigates the potential of integrating NOMA with two important 5G transmission schemes, namely, full duplex and device-to-device communication. This is important since the ambitious performance defined by the third generation partnership project for 5G is foreseen to be realized via seamless integration of several new technologies and transmission techniques.
22 October 2018 in IEEE Transactions on Communications
A network model is considered where Poisson distributed base stations transmit to N power-domain nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) users (UEs) each that employ successive interference cancellation (SIC) for decoding. We propose three models for the clustering of NOMA UEs and consider two different ordering techniques for the NOMA UEs: mean signal power-based and instantaneous signal-tointercell- interference-and-noise-ratio-based. For each technique, we present a signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio analysis for the coverage of the typical UE. We plot the rate region for the two-user case and show that neither ordering technique is consistently superior to the other. We propose two efficient algorithms for finding a feasible resource allocation that maximize the cell sum rate Rtot, for general N, constrained to: 1) a minimum throughput T for each UE, 2) identical throughput for all UEs. We show the existence of: 1) an optimum N that maximizes the constrained Rtot given a set of network parameters, 2) a critical SIC level necessary for NOMA to outperform orthogonal multiple access. The results highlight the importance in choosing the network parameters N, the constraints, and the ordering technique to balance the Rtot and fairness requirements. We also show that interference-aware UE clustering can significantly improve performance.
21 June 2019 in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
The next era of information revolution will rely on aggregating big data from massive numbers of devices that are widely scattered in our environment. Most of these devices are expected to be of low-complexity, low-cost, and limited power supply, which imposes stringent constraints on the network operation. In this regard, this paper investigates aerial data aggregation and field estimation from a finite spatial field via an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Instead of fusing, relaying, and routing the data across the wireless nodes to fixed locations access points, a UAV flies over the field and collects the required data for two prominent missions: data aggregation and field estimation. To accomplish these tasks, the field of interest is divided into several subregions, over which the UAV hovers to collect samples from the underlying nodes. To this end, we formulate and solve an optimization problem to minimize the total hovering and traveling time of each mission. While the former requires the collection of a prescribed average number of samples from the field, the latter ensures, for a given field spatial correlation model, that the average mean-squared estimation error of the field value is no more than a predetermined threshold at any point. These goals are fulfilled by optimizing the number of subregions, the area of each subregion, the hovering locations, the hovering time at each location, and the trajectory traversed between hovering locations. The proposed formulation is shown to be NP-hard mixed integer problem, and hence, a decoupled heuristic solution is proposed. The results show that there exists an optimal number of subregions that balance the tradeoff between hovering and traveling times, such that the total time for collecting the required samples is minimized.
11 April 2019 in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking
The massive wireless networks (MWNs) enable surging applications for the Internet of Things and cyber physical systems. In these applications, nodes typically exhibit stringent power constraints, limited computing capabilities, and sporadic traffic patterns. This paper develops a spatiotemporal model to characterize and design uncoordinated multiple access (UMA) strategies for MWNs. By combining stochastic geometry and queueing theory, the paper quantifies the scalability of UMA via the maximum spatiotemporal traffic density that can be accommodated in the network, while satisfying the target operational constraints (e.g., stability) for a given percentile of the nodes. The developed framework is then used to design UMA strategies that stabilize the node data buffers and achieve desirable latency, buffer size, and data rate.