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Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks

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A special issue of Electronics (ISSN 2079-9292). This special issue belongs to the section "Networks".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 24810

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Special Issue Editors

Dr. Wooseong Kim

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Guest Editor

Computer Engineering Department, Gachon University, Seongnam 461-701, Republic of Korea
Interests: multi-hop ad hoc networks; LTE and 5G wireless telecommunication systems; wireless LAN; SDN/NFV; IoT protocols
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Prof. Dr. Andreas Kassler

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Guest Editor

Department of Computer Science, Karlstad University, 65188 Karlstad, Sweden
Interests: software defined networking; network function virtualization; data plane programming; network protocols and architectures; network and service management; types of network implementations; Internet of Things; computer network; wireless network; communication network; mobile network; electricity network

Prof. Dr. Enrica Zola

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor

Department of Network Engineering, Polytechnic University of Catalonia, 08034 Barcelona, Spain
Interests: 5G; IEEE 802.11; network processes optimization; ad-hoc networks; auto organized networks; cellular networks; green networking; localization; mobility patterns; wireless heterogeneous networks

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

During the last decade, 5G technology has been developed and successfully commercialized for mobile communication networks. 5G technology supports enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) communication, massive machine type communications (mMTC) for Internet of Things (IoT), devices and ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) for mission-critical devices with IMT-2020 standard aims.

Some key technologies, such as 5G numerology with new radio (NR) waveform in sub- or above 6 GHz (mmWave) bands and MIMO with beamforming, allow those heterogeneous devices or services to overcome their own challenging scenarios. Still, 5G access technology has further challenges, as it is now evolving with convergence technologies, such as autonomously driven vehicles, smart factories, satellite or UAS, public safety, etc. This 5G+ demands more bandwidth, connectivity, and reliability.

Wireless communications in the Terahertz (THz) frequency band and unlicensed bands such as private 5G are considered to provide ultra-high user data rates. Further, nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) schemes have been explored for spectral efficiency and massive connectivity. V2X communication using mmWave side-links is not under-standardized. 5G and 6G now consider interoperation of GEO or LEO satellites and UAS to control autonomous vehicles, including drones, and provide wide-area cells for public safety or content broadcast. This nationwide cell can improve reliability and service continuity. As 5G+ pursues more than low-latency end-to-end access delay (<1 ms), mobile edge computing (MEC) has received attention in terms of supporting the requirements of network function virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN) to improve performance.

This Special Issue will present the most recent advances with respect to the theoretical foundations and practical implementation of 5G access communication and its evolution. Prospective authors are cordially invited to submit their original manuscripts on topics including but not limited to:

Sub- or above 6 GHz radio access technologies for 5G+
V2X communication using mmWave links
NOMA for 5G and beyond wireless networks
THz communications for 5G+ eMBB
Fog and MEC architecture for 5G access networks
Machine learning aided Fog and MEC operation
(Massive) multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) for a 5G+ access network
SDN-assist admission control in a 5G access network
Multi-connectivity and co-existence in satellite/UAS and a 5G network
Private 5G access network by dynamic spectrum access (DSA)
Localization issue in indoor or city cayon

Prof. Dr. Wooseong Kim
Prof. Dr. Andreas Kassler
Prof. Dr. Enrica Zola
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Electronics is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

Sub- or above 6 GHz radio access technologies for 5G+
V2X communication using mmWave links
NOMA for 5G and beyond wireless networks
THz communications for 5G+ eMBB
Fog and MEC architecture for 5G access networks
Machine learning aided Fog and MEC operation
(Massive) multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) for a 5G+ access network
SDN-assist admission control in a 5G access network
Multi-connectivity and co-existence in satellite/UAS and a 5G network
Private 5G access network by dynamic spectrum access (DSA)
Localization issue in indoor or city cayon

Published Papers (9 papers)

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Research

20 pages, 4747 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Forward-Reverse Orthogonal Matching Pursuit-Union-Subspace Pursuit-Based Multiuser Detector for Uplink Grant-Free NOMA Networks

by Olutayo Oyeyemi Oyerinde

Electronics 2022, 11(1), 125; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics11010125 - 31 Dec 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 1368

Abstract

Multiuser Detection (MUD) is quite challenging in uplink grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access wireless communication networks in which users sporadically transmit data. The reason for this is that the base station (BS) must perform detection of both multiuser activity and user signals concurrently, because knowledge of user activity status is not available at the BS. In this paper, a new multiuser detector, named the Forward-Reverse Orthogonal Matching Pursuit–Union–Subspace pursuit (FROMPUS)-based MUD, is proposed. The detector takes advantage of the concept of an initial support set. This serves as initial knowledge that is then employed in the reconstruction of active users’ signals. In addition, the detector uses the “serial-include” technique of incorporating a likely support set element candidates and a reliability testing procedure in which the most prominent elements of the support set are selected. To assess the performance of the proposed detector, computer simulations are performed. The results obtained for various parameter settings show that the FROMPUS performs better than any of the other five detectors considered in this paper. However, this excellent performance comes with a slightly higher computational complexity cost. Nonetheless, the cost is inconsequential, since the detector operates at the BS where complexity is of low priority in comparison to performance. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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10 pages, 428 KiB

Open AccessArticle

SCMA Codebook Design Based on Decomposition of the Superposed Constellation for AWGN Channel

by Zhaoyang Hou, Zheng Xiang, Peng Ren and Bohao Cao

Electronics 2021, 10(17), 2112; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10172112 - 30 Aug 2021

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2337

Abstract

In this study, we propose a method named decomposition of the superposed constellation (DCSC) to design sparse code multiple access (SCMA) codebooks for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. We prove that the power of the user symbols (USs) is accurately determined by the power of the superposed constellation (SC). Thus, we select quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations as the SC and decompose the SC into several groups of USs with power diversity. The minimum Euclidean distance (MED) between superposed symbols (SS-MED) in the receiver is determined by the selected QAM and MED between the multi-dimensional codewords (CW-MED) is optimized by matching the symbols on different dimensions. We propose a simplified DCSC (S-DCSC) by modifying the factor graph and avoiding the transmission of USs with low power, which greatly reduces the complexity of the message passing algorithm (MPA). The simulations show that the SS-MEDs of DCSC and S-DCSC are larger than those in previous papers and the BER performance of the proposed codebooks is better than others. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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23 pages, 2198 KiB

Open AccessArticle

autoCoin: Secure Content Sharing Based on Blockchain for Vehicular Cloud

by Wooseong Kim and Kyungho Ryu

Electronics 2021, 10(12), 1477; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10121477 - 19 Jun 2021

Cited by 5 | Viewed by 2128

Abstract

A future smart car will be more than a means of transportation, as it will not only move people to a destination without requiring them to drive but will enable people to work or enjoy a trip with entertainment. For this, smart vehicles need to deal with various types of data for safety and infotainment, such as real-time traffic, multi-media contents, documents and weather information. Recently, a fleet of vehicles connected to other vehicles and infrastructure (i.e., road side units) using a legacy or 5G mmWave spectrum has been considered as a platform to cooperate for those new tasks, known as the vehicular cloud or fog. Within the vehicular cloud, data management should consider security, high availability and interoperability between vehicles. However, these are not easily achievable without a centralized service provider; it is difficult for an autonomous P2P system to guarantee data integrity, and it cannot compensate drivers that actively participate in the vehicular cloud. Fortunately, the many successes achieved in the field of crypto-currency raise the possibility of defining incentives that are necessary for a sustainable digital economy. In this paper, we propose

a u t o C o i n

—an approach that aims to encourage smart vehicles to cooperate to create and exchange infotainment data securely under the assumption of rationality. We introduce a scalable blockchain architecture for

a u t o C o i n

and a smart contract to exchange contents without third-parties using an off-chain technique. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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18 pages, 784 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

A Randomized Greedy Heuristic for Steerable Wireless Backhaul Reconfiguration

by Nina Skorin-Kapov, Ricardo Santos, Hakim Ghazzai and Andreas Kassler

Electronics 2021, 10(4), 434; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics10040434 - 10 Feb 2021

Viewed by 1774

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the reconfiguration of wireless backhaul networks with mechanically steerable antennas in the presence of changing traffic demands. Reconfiguration requires the scheduling and coordination of several operations, including antenna alignment and link establishment/removal, with minimal disruption to existing user traffic. Previously, we proposed a Mixed Integer Linear Program (MILP) to orchestrate such reconfiguration with minimal packet loss. While the MILP solves the problem optimally for a limited number of discrete reconfiguration time slots, it does not scale well. In this paper, we propose an iterative randomized greedy algorithm to obtain suboptimal solutions in reduced time. The algorithm schedules the reconfiguration of wireless links by ranking them according to a set of attributes with associated weights and selecting them according to a randomized greedy function. Results on six different network scenarios indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve good quality solutions in significantly less time. Furthermore, by extending the reconfiguration time beyond the maximum number of time slots solvable by the MILP, the proposed heuristic can obtain superior solutions for some problem instances. The number of iterations of the algorithm can be tuned for its applicability in both offline and online planning scenarios. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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21 pages, 480 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Max-Min Fairness and Sum Throughput Maximization for In-Band Full-Duplex IoT Networks: User Grouping, Bandwidth and Power Allocation

by Ngo Tan Vu Khanh and Van Dinh Nguyen

Electronics 2020, 9(12), 2182; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9122182 - 18 Dec 2020

Cited by 1 | Viewed by 2063

Abstract

The skyrocketing growth in the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has posed a huge traffic demand for fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks and beyond. In-band full-duplex (IBFD), which is theoretically expected to double the spectral efficiency of a half-duplex wireless channel and connect more devices, has been considered as a promising technology in order to accelerate the development of IoT. In order to exploit the full potential of IBFD, the key challenge is how to handle network interference (including self-interference, co-channel interference, and multiuser interference) more effectively. In this paper, we propose a simple yet efficient user grouping method, where a base station (BS) serves strong downlink users and weak uplink users and vice versa in different frequency bands, mitigating severe network interference. First, we aim to maximize a minimum rate among all of the users subject to bandwidth and power constraints, which is formulated as a nonconvex optimization problem. By leveraging the inner approximation framework, we develop a very efficient iterative algorithm for solving this problem, which guarantees at least a local optimal solution. The proposed iterative algorithm solves a simple convex program at each iteration, which can be further cast to a conic quadratic program. We then formulate the optimization problem of sum throughput maximization, which can be solved by the proposed algorithm after some slight modifications. Extensive numerical results are provided to show not only the benefit of using full-duplex radio at BS, but also the advantage of the proposed user grouping method. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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21 pages, 2180 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Evolutionary Game for Content Cache in a mm-Wave-Based Vehicular Fog

by Wooseong Kim

Electronics 2020, 9(11), 1794; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9111794 - 29 Oct 2020

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 2135

Abstract

Vehicular fog computing is attractive for sharing computing resources and data for safety and infortainment of self-driving cars. Recently, the V2X communication technology using mm-Wave frequency spectrum accelerates such future mobile computing with large bandwidth and beam-forming using a directional antenna. Although the beam-forming technique requires a complicate procedure for beam alignment, it can reduce mutual interference by spatial diversity. From the beam-forming scheduling, the vehicular fog can improve network performance, which is limited by data locations. Beams toward a vehicle for the same content should be scheduled in the time domain. Instead, we propose to replicate the content to multiple vehicles nearby to diversify beam directions. However, it is a challenge for vehicles to cache the content because the content caching costs not only limited local storage, but data transmission for other vehicles. For this, we adopt evolutionary game theory in which vehicles learn an evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) from repeated games and maximize social utility. In this paper, we contribute to modeling a road segmentation for the mm-Wave V2X communication in order to derive connectivity probability with distributed content caches for the vehicular fog, and centralized and distributed algorithms for the evolutionary content cache game. From experiments, we confirm that content cache can improve V2X connectivity and the proposed evolution algorithm leads vehicles to choose the ESS for the content cache in the vehicular fog. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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16 pages, 3538 KiB

Open AccessArticle

KQI Performance Evaluation of 3GPP LBT Priorities for Indoor Unlicensed Coexistence Scenarios

by Eduardo Baena, Sergio Fortes and Raquel Barco

Electronics 2020, 9(10), 1701; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9101701 - 16 Oct 2020

Cited by 7 | Viewed by 3648

Abstract

The rapid proliferation of user devices with access to mobile broadband has been a challenge from both the operation and deployment points of view. With the incorporation of new services with high demand for bandwidth such as video in 4K, it has been deemed necessary to expand the existing capacity by including new bands, among which the unlicensed 5-GHz band is a very promising candidate. The operation of future 3GPP (Third Generation Partnership Project) mobile network standards deployments in this band implies the coexistence with other technologies such as WiFi, which is widespread. In this context, the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) or Quality of Experience (QoE) becomes an essential asset and is a challenge that has yet to be overcome. In this sense, 3GPP has proposed a traffic prioritization method based on the Listen Before Talk access parameters, defining a series of priorities. However, it does not specify how to make use of them, and even less so in potentially conflicting situations. This paper assesses the end-to-end performance of downlink unlicensed channel priorities in dense scenarios via implementing a novel simulation setup in terms of both multi-service performance and coexistence. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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17 pages, 1235 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Max–Min Fairness Optimization for D2D Communications Coexisting with Cellular Networks

by Hoai Giang Nguyen, Xuan Tung Nguyen, Van Son Nguyen, Trinh Van Chien, Tien Hoa Nguyen and Soonghwan Ro

Electronics 2020, 9(9), 1422; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9091422 - 02 Sep 2020

Cited by 3 | Viewed by 2437

Abstract

This paper considers a system consisting of a nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based device-to-device (D2D) communication system within a cellular network, in which the time and frequency resources are shared by everyone. In particular, D2D groups that constitute different pairs are assigned to the subchannels that the cellular users occupy. A max–min fairness optimization problem with power budget constraints is formulated and solved in this paper to reduce the mutual interference between the cellular users and D2D devices that substantially impacts that with the worst channel condition. For a low computational complexity solution, we propose the use of the bisection method together with the solution of a system of linear equalities. The proposed algorithm can provide uniformly good service to all of the cellular users and D2D devices in the coverage area by utilizing the minimal total transmit power. The simulation results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in the improvement of the spectral efficiency of the worst user under the different widely used subchannel assignments and pairing techniques. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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19 pages, 3775 KiB

Open AccessArticle

Passive Round-Trip-Time Positioning in Dense IEEE 802.11 Networks

by Israel Martin-Escalona and Enrica Zola

Electronics 2020, 9(8), 1193; https://doi.org/10.3390/electronics9081193 - 24 Jul 2020

Cited by 16 | Viewed by 4251

Abstract

The search for a unique and globally available location solution has attracted researchers for a long time. However, a solution for indoor scenarios, where high accuracy is needed, and Global Positioning System (GPS) is not available, has not been found yet. Despite the number of proposals in the literature, some require too long a calibration time for constructing the fingerprinting map, some rely on the periodic broadcast of positioning information that may downgrade the data communication channel, while others require specific hardware components that are not expected to be carried on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) wireless devices. The scalability of the location solution is another key parameter for next-generation internet of things (IoT) and 5G scenarios. A passive solution for indoor positioning of WiFi devices is first introduced here, which merges a time-difference of arrival (TDOA) algorithm with the novel fine time measurements (FTM) introduced in IEEE 802.11mc. A proof of concept of the WiFi passive TDOA algorithm is detailed in this paper, together with a thorough discussion on the requirements of the proposed algorithm. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Access Technology in 5G and Mobile Communication Networks)

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