Device-to-Device (D2D) is one of the important proposed solutions to increase the capacity, offload the traffic, and improve the energy effciency in next generation cellular networks. D2D communication is known as a direct communication between two users without using cellular infrastructure networks. Despite of large expected bene fits in terms of capacity in D2D, the coexistence of D2D and cellular networks in the same spectrum creates new challenges in interference management and network design. To limit the interference power control schemes on cellular networks and D2D networks are typically adopted. Even though power control is introduced to limit the interference level, it does not prevent cellular and D2D users from experiencing coverage limitation when sharing the same radio resources. Therefore, the design of such networks requires the availability of suitable methods able to properly model the eff ect of interference ...

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 cumulative impact of co-channel interferers, commonly referred to as aggregate network interference, is one of the main performance limiting factors in today’s mobile cellular networks. Thus, its careful statistical description is decisive for system analysis and design. A system model for interference analysis is required to capture essential network variation effects, such as base station deployment- and signal propagation characteristics. Furthermore it should be simple and tractable so as to enable first-order insights on design fundamentals and rapid exchange of new ideas. Interference modeling has posed a challenge ever since the establishment of traditional macro cellular deployments. The recent emergence of heterogeneous network topologies complicates matters by contesting many established aspects of time-honored approaches. This thesis presents user-centric system models that enable to investigate scenarios with an asymmetric interference impact. The first approach simplifies the interference analysis in a ...

Developing realistic channel models is one of the greatest challenges for describing wireless communications. Their quality is crucial for accurately predicting the performance of a wireless system. While on the one hand, channel models have to be accurate in describing the physical properties of wave propagation, on the other hand, they have to be as least complex as possible. With the recent emergence of antennas with a massive amount of elements as a promising technology for a further enhancement of spectral efficiency, new channel models that characterize the propagation environment in both azimuth and elevation become necessary. While standardization bodies such as 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) and International Telecommunications Unit (ITU) have introduced a 3-dimensional (3D) geometry-based stochastic channel model, a system-level modeling has been missing to serve the purpose of further analysis and evaluations. Furthermore, with such a ...

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) evolved to a key enabling physical layer (PHY) technology for the fifth generation (5G) of mobile communication systems and beyond. While the envisioned use cases of such communications systems are diverse, so are the challenges to meet their respective requirements. As a large-scale evolution of already well-established MIMO communications technologies, massive MIMO promises benefits with respect to all possible use cases. Theoretical works on massive MIMO, however, typically assumes i.i.d. Rayleigh fading channels without spatial channel correlation. The application of this model is justified through the assumption of rich scattering environments, which is claimed to hold, for example, in indoor environments. Spatial correlation of wireless channels leads to inter-stream interference in single-user MIMO communications systems and to inter-user interference in multi-user MIMO systems with linear precoding. Channel correlation is therefore crucial for the performance of such ...

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 ...

This thesis explores one of the key enablers of 5G wireless networks leveraging small cell network deployments, namely proactive caching. Endowed with predictive capabilities and harnessing recent developments in storage, context-awareness and social networks, peak traffic demands can be substantially reduced by proactively serving predictable user demands, via caching at base stations and users' devices. In order to show the effectiveness of proactive caching techniques, we tackle the problem from two different perspectives, namely theoretical and practical ones. In the first part of this thesis, we use tools from stochastic geometry to model and analyse the theoretical gains of caching at base stations. In particular, we focus on 1) single-tier networks where small base stations with limited storage are deployed, 2) multi-tier networks with limited backhaul, and) multi-tier clustered networks with two different topologies, namely coverage-aided and capacity-aided deployments. Therein, ...

The next generation of wireless communication networks will facilitate the connection of a large number of devices and a broad range of services. Serving such a large amount of user equipment (UEs) can be of very high cost if using active antenna solutions such as increasing the number of base stations (BSs), using massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas, and deploying relays between the BSs and the UEs. In this context, a passive antenna solution, such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), would be more beneficial and attractive. RIS has become an emerging technology with diverse applications in future wireless networks, owing to its ability to dynamically control and optimize the propagation environment. The rapid evolution driven by escalating performance demands of coverage in blocked line-of-sight (LOS) scenarios has prompted the exploration of RIS. Motivated by the potential benefits of RIS in ...

In the last decades the world has experienced a massive growth in the demand for wireless services. The recent popularity of hand-held devices with data exchange capabilities over wireless networks, such as smartphones and tablets, increased the wireless data traffic even further. This trend is not expected to cease in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is expected to accelerate as everyday apparatus unrelated with data communications, such as vehicles or household devices, are foreseen to be equipped with wireless communication capabilities. Further, the next generation wireless networks should be designed such that they have increased spectral and energy efficiency, provide uniformly good service to all of the accommodated users and handle many more devices simultaneously. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) systems, also termed as large-scale MIMO, very large MIMO or full-dimension MIMO, have recently been proposed as a candidate ...

Multi-user multi-antenna wireless communication systems have become essential due to the widespread of smart applications and the use of the Internet. Ultra-dense deployment of small cell networks has been recognized as an effective way to meet the exponentially growing mobile data traffic and to accommodate increasingly diversified mobile applications for beyond 5G and future wireless networks. Small cells using low power nodes are meant to be deployed in hot spots, where the number of users varies strongly with time and between adjacent cells. As a result, small cells are expected to have burst-like traffic, which makes the static time division duplex (TDD) frame configuration strategy, where a common TDD pattern is selected for the whole network, not able to meet the users' requirements and the traffic fluctuations. Dynamic TDD (DTDD) technology which allows the cells to independently adapt their TDD ...

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 ...

Since Marconi succeeded in carrying out the first wireless transmission in 1894, experimental research has been always linked with wireless communications. Today, most wireless communications research relies only on computer simulations. Although computer simulations are necessary and recommendable for wireless systems evaluation, they only reflect the simulation environment rather than the actual scenarios in which wireless systems operate. Consequently, it is desirable to assess wireless communications systems in real-world scenarios while, at the same time, keeping the required effort within reasonable terms. Among the different strategies suitable for undertaking such assessment, the testbed approach constitutes a simple and flexible enough solution based on the software-defined radio concept in which only the fundamental operations (usually the transmission and the acquisition) are carried out in real- time, while the remaining tasks are implemented off-line in high-level programming languages (e.g. MATLAB) and using ...

This thesis deals with the problem of increasing the spectrum efficiency of cellular systems, by the use of antenna array base stations. The focus of the thesis is on downlink transmission in frequency division duplex systems, i.e., systems with different up and downlink carrier frequency. In a short summary the thesis: * Proposes five reasonable propagation models. * Uses these models to design and analyze three different beamformers: The maximum desired power (MDP), the summed interference to carrier ratio minimizing (SCIR) and the generalized-SCIR beamformer. * Introduces three capacity enhancement approaches: same sector frequency reuse (SSFR), reduced cluster size without nulling (RCS-WON) and reduced cluster size with nulling (RCS-WIN). * Proposes channel allocation, power control, and beamforming algorithms for these approaches. * Estimates the ``outage probability'' (probability of insufficient quality), for SICR-SSFR, SICR-RCS-WON and SICR-RCS-WIN, using simulations as well as ...

The modern power grid is facing major challenges in the transition to a low-carbon energy sector. The growing energy demand and environmental concerns require carefully revisiting how electricity is generated, transmitted, and consumed, with an eye to the integration of renewable energy sources. The envisioned smart grid is expected to address such issues by introducing advanced information, control, and communication technologies into the energy infrastructure. In this context, demand-side management (DSM) makes the end users responsible for improving the efficiency, reliability and sustainability of the power system: this opens up unprecedented possibilities for optimizing the energy usage and cost at different levels of the network. The design of DSM techniques has been extensively discussed in the literature in the last decade, although the performance of these methods has been scarcely investigated from the analytical point of view. In this thesis, ...

Feedback in wireless communications is tied to a long-standing and successful history, facilitating robust and spectrally efficient transmission over the uncertain wireless medium. Since the application of multiple antennas at both ends of the communication link, enabling multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, the importance of feedback information to achieve the highest performance is even more pronounced. Especially when multiple antennas are employed by the transmitter to handle the interference between multiple users, channel state information (CSI) is a fundamental prerequisite. The corresponding multi-user MIMO, interference alignment and coordination techniques are considered as a central part of future cellular networks to cope with the growing inter-cell-interference, caused by the unavoidable densification of base stations to support the exponentially increasing demand on network capacities. However, this vision can only be implemented with efficient feedback algorithms that provide accurate CSI at the transmitter without ...