Wireless networks and power distribution grids are experiencing increasing demands on their efficiency and reliability. Judicious methods for allocating scarce resources such as power and bandwidth are of paramount importance. As a result, nonlinear optimization and signal processing tools have been incorporated into the design of contemporary networks. This thesis develops schemes for efficient resource allocation (RA) in such dynamic networks, with an emphasis in stochasticity, which is accounted for in the problem formulation as well as in the algorithms and schemes to solve those problems. Stochastic optimization and decomposition techniques are investigated to develop low-complexity algorithms with specific applications in cross-layer design of wireless communications, cognitive radio (CR) networks and smart power distribution systems. The costs and constraints on the availability of network resources, together with diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements, render network design, management, and operation challenging ...

Distributed signal or information processing using Internet of Things (IoT), facilitates real-time monitoring of signals, for example, environmental pollutants, health indicators, and electric energy consumption in a smart city. Despite the promising capabilities of IoTs, these distributed deployments often face the challenge of data privacy and communication rate constraints. In traditional machine learning, training data is moved to a data center, which requires massive data movement from distributed IoT devices to a third-party location, thus raising concerns over privacy and inefficient use of communication resources. Moreover, the growing network size, model size, and data volume combined lead to unusual complexity in the design of optimization algorithms beyond the compute capability of a single device. This necessitates novel system architectures to ensure stable and secure operations of such networks. Federated learning (FL) architecture, a novel distributed learning paradigm introduced by McMahan ...

This thesis proposes and discusses aspects of a low-cost wireless network called “Hopscotch” as a potential solution to the rural broadband problem. Providing broadband internet access to rural locations is challenging due to the long distances between internet backbone and households, the sparse population density and difficult terrain. Hopscotch uses a network of renewable powered base stations, termed “WindFi”, connected by point-to-point links, to deliver internet access to rural communities. A combination of frequency bands are used within Hopscotch. Standard IEEE 802.11 5GHz WiFi access technology is used for high capacity links, and an ultra high frequency TV “white space” spectrum overlay in the 600-800 MHz band provides long distance coverage. The advantages of “white space” spectrum are demonstrated for a rural wireless scenario; reducing the number of base stations required to cover a community and decreasing the transmit power ...

The envisioned rapid and exponential increase of wireless data traffic demand in the next years imposes rethinking current wireless cellular networks due to the scarcity of the available spectrum. In this regard, three main drivers are considered to increase the capacity of today's most advanced (4G systems) and future (5G systems and beyond) cellular networks: i) use more bandwidth (more Hz) through spectral aggregation, ii) enhance the spectral efficiency per base station (BS) (more bits/s/Hz/BS) by using multiple antennas at BSs and users (i.e. MIMO systems), and iii) increase the density of BSs (more BSs/km2) through a dense and heterogeneous deployment (known as dense heterogeneous cellular networks). We focus on the last two drivers. First, the use of multi-antenna systems allows exploiting the spatial dimension for several purposes: improving the capacity of a conventional point-to-point wireless link, increasing the number ...

Nowadays, with a worldwide market penetration of over 50% in the mobile telecommunications sector, there is also an unrelenting demand from the subscribers for ever increasing transmission rates and availability of broadband-like experience on the handset. Due to this, research in next-generation networks is rife. Such systems are expected to achieve peak data rates of up to 1 Gbps through the use of innovative technologies such as multiple-input and multiple- output (MIMO) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA). Two more ways of boosting capacity have also been identified: shrinking cell sizes and greater reuse of resources in the same area. This forms the foundation of the research presented in this thesis. For operators, the costs involved with planning and deploying additional network infrastructure to provide a dense coverage of small, high capacity cells cannot be justified. Femto-cells, however, promise ...

The ability to easily exchange and access data has transformed the way we work, study, inform and entertain ourselves. In particular, the Internet has had an effect on people’s lives in the past two decades that is profound. Profound as this effect may be, people seem not to grow tired of it. On the contrary: as of today, the Internet revolution is far from over. The thirst for bigger amounts of data at higher speeds and biquitous connectivity seem not to abate. This thirst for more, faster and better quality data is both a huge challenge and a huge opportunity for the broadband access industry. The opportunity lies on the fact that, as of the end of 2012, there were 600 million subscribers to broadband services around the world. Plus, even though the market is already enormous, it still has ...

Currently, the telecommunications market has brought changes to the design of the old model of the telecommunications network. The emergence of new technologies for higher speed access was inevitable in order to meet the requirements of the appearance of the multimedia services (VoD, online gaming etc.). The latest technologies for broadband access over telephone pairs are Digital Subscriber Lines or DSL. This set of xDSL technologies allow the transfer of binary high speed over telephone twisted pair by using a suitable type of line codes. They allow a flow of high-speed information both asymmetrical and symmetrical over the telephone loop. This thesis presents the state of the art of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) technologies suggested to improve the performance of DSL systems and proposes a new approach to this issue. The main contributions of this thesis includes extended bandwidth channel ...

The use model of mobile networks has drastically changed in recent years. Next generation devices and new applications have made the availability of high quality wireless data everywhere a necessity for mobile users. Thus, cellular networks must be highly improved in terms of coverage and capacity. Networks that include smart entities and functionalities, and that allow to fulfil all the mobile networks’ new requirements are called heterogeneous networks. One key component in heterogeneous networks is femtocells. Femtocells are low range, low power mobile base stations deployed by the end consumers, which underlay the macrocell system and provide a solution to the problem of indoor coverage for mobile communications. Femtocells can reuse the radio spectrum and, thereby, they allow increasing the spectral efficiency. Moreover, under appropriate algorithms for interference control, they give a viable alternative to the problem of spectrum static ...

Distributed signal processing algorithms have become a key approach for statistical inference in wireless networks and applications such as wireless sensor networks and smart grids. It is well known that distributed processing techniques deal with the extraction of information from data collected at nodes that are distributed over a geographic area. In this context, for each specific node, a set of neighbor nodes collect their local information and transmit the estimates to a specific node. Then, each specific node combines the collected information together with its local estimate to generate an improved estimate. In this thesis, novel distributed cooperative algorithms for inference in ad hoc, wireless sensor networks and smart grids are investigated. Low-complexity and effective algorithms to perform statistical inference in a distributed way are devised. A number of innovative approaches for dealing with node failures, compression of data ...

Over the last few decades, transistor miniaturization has enabled a tremendous increase in the processing capability of commercial electronic devices, which, combined with the reduction of production costs, has tremendously fostered the usage of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) both in terms of number of users and required data rates. In turn, this has led to a tremendous increment in the energetic demand of the ICT sector, which is expected to further grow during the upcoming years, reaching unsustainable levels of greenhouse gas emissions as reported by the European Council. Additionally, the autonomy of battery operated devices is getting reduced year after year since battery technology has not evolved fast enough to cope with the increase of energy consumption associated to the growth of the node’s processing capability. Energy harvesting, which is known as the process of collecting energy ...

With the rapidly growing of the customers’ data traffic demand, improving the system capacity and increasing the user throughput have become essential concerns for the future fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication network. In this context, device-to-device (D2D) communication and in-band full-duplex (FD) are proposed as potential solutions to increase the spatial spectrum utilization and the user rate in a cellular network. D2D allows two nearby devices to communicate without base station (BS) participation or with limited participation. On the other hand, FD communication enables simultaneous transmission and reception in the same frequency band. Due to the short distance property of D2D links, exploiting the FD technology in D2D communication is an excellent choice to further improve the cellular spectrum efficiency and the users’ throughput. However, practical FD transceivers add new challenges for D2D communication. For instance, the existing FD devices cannot ...

This thesis consists in developing distributed mechanisms for resource allocation in next-generation cellular networks. In the first part of this thesis, the technical and economic challenges for the implementation of distributed storage policies in small cell networks are addressed. In particular, a proactive storage approach is proposed enabling the small base stations to exploit the information extracted from online social networks to estimate the local popularity of the files. Another optimized storage approach is proposed for ultra-dense cellular networks while accounting for the instantaneous variations of the state of the storage units. To facilitate the deployment of these storage solutions, new economic mechanisms are developed to motivate content providers to cooperate with network operators and store their files within the operators' small base stations. In the second part of this thesis, the problem of spectrum management is studied in cache-enabled ...

The widespread use of mobile internet and smart applications has led to an explosive growth in mobile data traffic. With the rise of smart homes, smart buildings, and smart cities, this demand is ever growing since future communication systems will require the integration of multiple networks serving diverse sectors, domains and applications, such as multimedia, virtual or augmented reality, machine-to-machine (M2M) communication / the Internet of things (IoT), automotive applications, and many more. Therefore, in the future, the communication systems will not only be required to provide Gbps wireless connectivity but also fulfill other requirements such as low latency and massive machine type connectivity while ensuring the quality of service. Without significant technological advances to increase the system capacity, the existing telecommunications infrastructure will be unable to support these multi-dimensional requirements. This poses an important demand for suitable waveforms with ...

Due to the increasing global IP traffic and the exponential growing demand for broadband services, optical networks are experimenting significant changes. Advanced modulation formats are being implemented at the Digital Signal Processing (DSP) level as key enablers for high data rate transmission. Whereas in the network layer, flexi Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplexing (DWDM) grids are being investigated in order to efficiently use the optical spectrum according to the traffic demand. Enabling these capabilities makes high data rate transmission more feasible. Hence, introducing flexibility in the system is one of the main goals of this thesis. Furthermore, minimizing the cost and enhancing the Spectral Efficiency (SE) of the system are two crucial issues to consider in the transceiver design. This dissertation investigates the use of Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM) based either on the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) or the Fast ...

This dissertation deals with the distributed processing techniques for parameter estimation and efficient data-gathering in wireless communication and sensor networks. The estimation problem consists in inferring a set of parameters from temporal and spatial noisy observations collected by different nodes that monitor an area or field. The objective is to derive an estimate that is as accurate as the one that would be obtained if each node had access to the information across the entire network. With the aim of enabling an energy aware and low-complexity distributed implementation of the estimation task, several useful optimization techniques that generally yield linear estimators were derived in the literature. Up to now, most of the works considered that the nodes are interested in estimating the same vector of global parameters. This scenario can be viewed as a special case of a more general ...