Multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) improves the system channel capacity by generating a large virtual MIMO channel between a base station and multiple user terminals (UTs) with effective utilization of wireless resources. Block beamforming algorithms such as Block Diagonalization (BD) and Block Maximum Signal-to-Noise ratio (BMSN) have been proposed in order to realize MU-MIMO broadcast transmission. The BD algorithm cancels inter-user interference (IUI) by creating the weights so that the channel matrices for the other users are set to be zero matrices. The BMSN algorithm has a function of maintaining a high gain response for each desired user in addition to IUI cancellation. Therefore, the BMSN algorithm generally outperforms the BD algorithm. However, when the number of transmit antennas is equal to the total number of receive antennas, the transmission rate by both BD and BMSN algorithms is decreased. This is because the eigenvalues of channel matrices are too small to support data transmission. To resolve the issue, this paper focuses on an antenna selection (AS) method at the UTs. The AS method reduces the number of pattern nulls for the other users except an intended user in the BD and BMSN algorithms. It is verified via bit error rate (BER) evaluation that the AS method is effective in the BD and BMSN algorithms, especially, when the number of user antennas with a low bit rate (i.e., low signal-to-noise power ratio) is increased. Moreover, this paper evaluates the achievable bit rate and throughput including an actual channel state information feedback based on IEEE802.11ac standard. Although the number of equivalent receive antenna is reduced to only one by the AS method when the number of antennas at the UT is two, it is shown that the throughputs by BD and BMSN with the AS method (BD-AS and BMSN-AS) are higher than those by the conventional BD and BMSN algorithms.

In this paper, we posit that, in future mobile network, network softwarization will be prevalent, and it becomes important to utilize deep machine learning within network to classify mobile traffic into fine grained slices, by identifying application types and devices so that we can apply Quality-of-Service (QoS) control, mobile edge/multi-access computing, and various network function per application and per device. This paper reports our initial attempt to apply deep machine learning for identifying application types from actual mobile network traffic captured from an MVNO, mobile virtual network operator and to design the system for classifying it to application specific slices.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmission, in which the number of antennas is considerably more than the number of user terminals, has attracted attention as a key technology in next-generation mobile communication systems, because it enables improvements in the service area and interference mitigation with simple signal processing. Multi-beam massive MIMO employing high-power beam selection in the analog part and a blind algorithm in the digital part, such as the constant modulus algorithm that does not need channel state information, has been proposed and shown to offer high transmission efficiency. In this paper, in order to realize higher transmission rates and communication efficiency, we propose a beam-selection method that uses multi-beam amplitude information only. Furthermore, this method can be realized through signal processing with a simple configuration and is highly suitable for hybrid analog-digital massive MIMO, which is advantageous in terms of cost and power consumption. Here, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by computer simulation.

This paper proposes a hardware configuration for uplink multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) transmissions in a distributed antenna system (DAS). The demand for high-speed transmission in the uplink has increased recently, because of which standardizations in LTE-advanced and IEEE 802.11ax networks is currently underway. User terminal (UT) scheduling on the downlink MU-MIMO transmission is easy even in unlicensed band such as those in wireless local area network (WLAN) systems. However, the detailed management of the UTs is difficult on the uplink MU-MIMO transmissions because of the decentralized wireless access control. The proposed configuration allows an antenna to be selected from an external device on the access point (AP). All AP antennas are divided into groups, and the received signal in each group is input to the amplitude detector via a directional coupler. Subsequently, the selected antenna is fed by a multiple-to-one switch instead of a matrix switch. To clarify the effectiveness of the proposed configuration, we conduct computer simulations based on the ray-tracing method for propagation channels in an indoor environment.

This paper proposes a novel access control scheme with collision detection that utilizes multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology. Carrier sense multiple access with collision detection (CSMA/CD) is used in Ethernet wired local area networks (LANs) for media access control (MAC). CSMA/CD can immediately abort a transmission if any collision is detected and is thus able to change to a retransmission state. In Ethernet, CSMA/CD results in a transmission efficiency of approximately 90% because the protocol makes the transmission band available for useful communication by this retransmission function. Conversely, in conventional wireless LANs (WLANs), the packet collisions due to interfering signals and the retransmission due to collisions are significant issues. Because conventional WLANs cannot detect packet collisions during signal transmission, the success of a transmission can only be determined by whether an acknowledgment (ACK) frame has been received. Consequently, the transmission efficiency is low — approximately 60%. The objective of our study is to increase the transmission efficiency of WLANs to make it at least equal to that of Ethernet. Thus, we propose a novel access control scheme with collision detection that utilizes MIMO technology. When preamble signals are transmitted before transmitting data packets from an antenna, the proposed scheme can detect packet collisions during signal transmission at another antenna; then, the affected packets are retransmitted immediately. Two fundamental technologies are utilized to realize our proposed scheme. The first technology is the access control protocol in the MAC layer in the form of the MIMO frame sequence protocol, which is used to detect signal interference. The other technology is signal processing in the physical (PHY) layer that actualizes collision detection. This paper primarily deals with the proposed MAC layer scheme, which is evaluated by theoretical analyses and computer simulations. Evaluation by computer simulations indicate that the proposed scheme in a transmission efficiency of over 90%.

Interference in ad hoc WLANs is a common occurrence as there is no centralized access point controlling device access to the wireless channel. IEEE 802.11 WLANs use carrier sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) which initiates the Request to Send/Clear to Send (RTS/CTS) handshaking mechanism to solve the hidden node problem. While it solves the hidden node problem, RTS/CTS triggers the exposed node problem. In this paper, we present an evaluation of a method for reducing exposed nodes in 802.11 ad hoc WLANs. Using asymmetric transmission ranges for RTS and CTS frames, a cross-layer design is implemented between Layer 2 and 3 of the OSI model. Information obtained by the AODV routing protocol is utilized in adjusting the RTS transmission range at the MAC Layer. The proposed method is evaluated with the NS-2 simulator and we observe significant throughput improvement, and confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method. Especially when the mobile nodes are randomly distributed, the throughput gain of the Asymmetric RTS/CTS method is up to 30% over the Standard RTS/CTS method.

A multi-channel cognitive radio is a powerful solution for recovering the exhaustion of frequency spectrum resources. In a cognitive radio, although master and slave terminals (which construct a communication link) have the freedom to access arbitrary channels, access channel mismatch is caused. A rendezvous scheme based on frequency hopping can compensate for this mismatch by exchanging control signals through a selected channel in accordance with a certain rule. However, conventional frequency hopping schemes do not consider an access protocol of both control signals in the rendezvous scheme and the signal caused by channel access from other systems. Further, they do not consider an information sharing method to reach a consensus between the master and slave terminals. This paper proposes a modified rendezvous scheme based on learning-based channel occupancy rate (COR) estimation and describes a specific channel-access rule in the slave terminal. On the basis of this rule, the master estimates a channel selected by the slave by considering the average COR of the other systems. Since the master can narrow down the number of channels, a fast rendezvous scheme with a few control signals is established.

Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a kind of wireless sensor network that provides two-way communication between smart meters and city utilities in the neighborhood area of the smart grid. And the routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL) is being considered for use in AMI networks. However, there still exist several problems that need to be solved, especially with respect to QoS guarantees. To address these problems, an improved algorithm of RPL based on triangle module operator named as TMO is proposed. TMO comprehensively evaluates routing metrics: end-to-end delay, number of hops, expected transmission count, node remaining energy, and child node count. Moreover, TMO uses triangle module operator to fuse membership functions of these routing metrics. Then, the node with minimum rank value will be selected as preferred parent (the next hop). Consequently, the QoS of RPL-based AMI networks can be guaranteed effectively. Simulation results show that TMO offers a great improvement over several the most popular schemes for RPL like ETXOF, OF-FL and additive composition metric manners in terms of network lifetime, average end-to-end delay, average packet loss ratio, average hop count from nodes to root, etc.

Throughput prediction is one of the promising techniques to improve the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) of mobile applications. To address the problem of predicting future throughput distribution accurately during the whole session, which can exhibit large throughput fluctuations in different scenarios (especially scenarios of moving user), we propose a history-based throughput prediction method that utilizes time series analysis and machine learning techniques for mobile network communication. This method is called the Hybrid Prediction with the Autoregressive Model and Hidden Markov Model (HOAH). Different from existing methods, HOAH uses Support Vector Machine (SVM) to classify the throughput transition into two classes, and predicts the transmission control protocol (TCP) throughput by switching between the Autoregressive Model (AR Model) and the Gaussian Mixture Model-Hidden Markov Model (GMM-HMM). We conduct field experiments to evaluate the proposed method in seven different scenarios. The results show that HOAH can predict future throughput effectively and decreases the prediction error by a maximum of 55.95% compared with other methods.

With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on to which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues such as different applications' deadlines, monetary cost and energy consumption, how the MU decides whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN is an important issue. Previous studies assume the MU's mobility pattern is known in advance, which is not always true. In this paper, we study the MU's policy to minimize his monetary cost and energy consumption without known MU mobility pattern. We propose to use a kind of reinforcement learning technique called deep Q-network (DQN) for MU to learn the optimal offloading policy from past experiences. In the proposed DQN based offloading algorithm, MU's mobility pattern is no longer needed. Furthermore, MU's state of remaining data is directly fed into the convolution neural network in DQN without discretization. Therefore, not only does the discretization error present in previous work disappear, but also it makes the proposed algorithm has the ability to generalize the past experiences, which is especially effective when the number of states is large. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed offloading algorithms.

Because mobile users demand a high quality and energy-friendly video delivery service that efficiently uses wireless resources, we introduce an energy-efficient video delivery system by applying moving route navigation and playout buffer control based on the mobile throughput history data. The proposed system first determines the optimal travel route to achieve high-speed and energy-efficient communications. Then when a user enters a high throughput area, our system temporarily extends the video playout buffer size, and the user aggressively downloads video segments via a high-speed and energy-efficient wireless connection until the extended buffer is filled. After leaving this area, the user consumes video segments from the extended buffer in order to keep smooth video playback without wireless communications. We carry out computer simulations, laboratory and field experiments and confirm that the proposed system can achieve energy-efficient mobile video delivery.

This paper enhances the QoE of audio and video multicast transmission over a wireless LAN by means of reliable groupcast schemes. We use GCR (GroupCast with Retries) Unsolicited Retry and GCR Block ACK as reliable groupcast schemes; they are standardized by IEEE 802.11aa. We assume that a wireless access point transmits audio and video streams to several terminals connected to the access point by groupcast. We compare three schemes: Groupcast with EDCA (Enhanced Distributed Channel Access), GCR Unsolicited Retry and GCR Block ACK. We perform computer simulations under various network conditions to assess application-level QoS and evaluate QoE by a subjective experiment. As a result, we find that the most effective scheme depends on network conditions.

In order to enhance QoE of audio and video IP transmission, this paper proposes a method for mitigating the spatial quality impairment during burst loss periods over the wireless networks in the video output scheme SCS, which is a QoE-based video output scheme. SCS switches between two common video output schemes: frame skipping and error concealment. The proposed method pauses video output with an undamaged frame during the burst loss period in order not to pause video output on a degraded frame. We perform an experiment with constant thresholds, the table-lookup method, and the proposed method under various network conditions. The result shows that the effect of the proposed method on QoE can differ with the contents and GOP structures.

By focusing on the recent swing to the centralized approach by the software defined network (SDN), this paper presents a novel network architecture for refactoring the current distributed Internet protocol (IP) by not only utilizing the SDN itself but also implementing its cooperation with the optical transport layer. The first IP refactoring is for flexible network topology reconfiguration: the global routing and explicit routing functions are transferred from the distributed routers to the centralized SDN. The second IP refactoring is for cost-efficient maintenance migration: we introduce a resource portable IP router that can behave as a shared backup router by cooperating with the optical transport path switching. Extensive evaluations show that our architecture makes the current IP network easier to configure and more scalable. We also validate the feasibility of our proposal.

The energy consumption of network virtualization environments (NVEs) has become a critical issue. In this paper, we focus on reducing the data switching energy consumption of NVE. We first analyze the data switching energy of NVE. Then, we propose a dynamic energy efficient virtual link resource reallocation (eEVLRR) approach for NVE. eEVLRR dynamically reallocates the energy efficient substrate resources (s-resources) for virtual links with dynamic changes of embeddable s-resources to save the data switching energy. In order to avoid traffic interruptions while reallocating, we design a cross layer application-session-based forwarding model for eEVLRR that can identify and forward each data transmission flow along the initial specified substrate data transport path until end without traffic interruptions. The results of performance evaluations show that eEVLRR not only guarantees the allocated s-resources of virtual links are continuously energy efficient to save data switching energy but also has positive impacts on virtual network acceptance rate, revenues and s-resources utilization.

Applying Software Defined Network (SDN) technology to wireless networks are attracting much attention. Our previous study proposed a channel utilization method based on SDN/OpenFlow technology to improve the channel utilization efficiency of the multi-channel wireless backhaul network (WBN). However, since control messages are inherently transmitted with data traffic on a same channel in WBN, it inevitably degrades the network capacity. Specifically, the amount of control messages for collecting statistical information of each flow (FlowStats) linearly increases with the number of ongoing flows, thereby being the dominant overhead for backhaul networks. In this paper, we propose a new method that prevents the increase of control traffic while retaining the network performance of the previous method. Our proposed method uses statistical information of each interface (PortStats) instead of per-flow information (FlowStats), and handles multiple flows on the interface together if possible. Otherwise, to handle individual flow, we propose a way to estimate per-flow information without introducing extra control messages. Finally, we show that the proposed method offers the same performance with the previous method, while greatly reducing the amount of control traffic.

This paper investigates an adaptive movable access point (AMAP) system and explores its feasibility in a static indoor classroom environment with an applied wireless local area network (WLAN) system. In the AMAP system, the positions of multiple access points (APs) are adaptively moved in accordance with clustered user groups, which ensures effective coverage for non-uniform user distributions over the target area. This enhances the signal to interference and noise power ratio (SINR) performance. In order to derive the appropriate AP positions, we utilize the k-means method in the AMAP system. To accurately estimate the position of each user within the target area for user clustering, we use the general methods of received signal strength indicator (RSSI) or time of arrival (ToA), measured by the WLAN systems. To clarify the basic effectiveness of the AMAP system, we first evaluate the SINR performance of the AMAP system and a conventional fixed-position AP system with equal intervals using computer simulations. Moreover, we demonstrate the quantitative improvement of the SINR performance by analyzing the ToA and RSSI data measured in an indoor classroom environment in order to clarify the feasibility of the AMAP system.

A penta-band antenna based on the mu-negative transmission line is presented for radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting application. The antenna utilizes five radiation modes; two quarter wavelength resonances, three quarter wavelength resonance, zeroth order resonance, and first order resonance. The parasitic radiating strip antenna generates quarter wavelength resonance radiation. The dual band antenna based on two unit cell mu-negative (MNG) transmission line gives birth to the zeroth order resonance (ZOR) mode and the first order resonance (FOR) mode. The parasitic radiating strip and dual band antenna based on two unit mu-negative (MNG) transmission line are magnetically coupled by a feed monopole with gap. This feed monopole, simultaneously, radiates at quarter and three quarter wavelength resonance frequency to cover the other bands. The multi-mode coupling mechanism of this penta-band antenna is well modeled by our derived equivalent circuit. The measured radiation efficiencies are more than 87% over the entire penta-band.

The impedance expansion method (IEM), which has been previously proposed by the authors, is a circuit-modeling technique for electrically-very-small devices. This paper provides a new idea on the principle of undesired radiation in wireless power transfer systems by employing IEM. In particular, it is shown that the undesired radiation is due to equivalent infinitesimal dipoles and loops of the currents on the coils.

The spectrum sculpting precoder (SSP) is a precoding scheme for sidelobe suppression of frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals. It can form deep spectral notches at chosen frequencies and is suitable for cognitive radio systems. However, the SSP degrades the error rate as the number of notched frequencies increases. Orthogonal precoding that improves the SSP can achieve both spectrum notching and the ideal error rate, but its computational complexity is very high since the precoder matrix is large in size. This paper proposes an effective and equivalent decomposition of the precoder matrix by QR-decomposition in order to reduce the computational complexity of orthogonal precoding. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method can drastically reduce the computational complexity with no performance degradation.

For the reconstruction of the feedback polynomial of a synchronous scrambler placed after a convolutional encoder, the existing algorithms require the prior knowledge of a dual word of the convolutional code. To address the case of a dual word being unknown, a new algorithm for the reconstruction of the feedback polynomial based on triple correlation characteristic of an m-sequence is proposed. First, the scrambled convolutional code sequence is divided into bit blocks; the product of the scrambled bit blocks with a dual word is proven to be an m-sequence with the same period as the synchronous scrambler. Second, based on the triple correlation characteristic of the generated m-sequence, a dual word is estimated; the generator polynomial of the generated m-sequence is computed by two locations of the triple correlation peaks. Finally, the feedback polynomial is reconstructed using the generator polynomial of the generated m-sequence. As the received sequence may contain bit errors, a method for detecting triple correlation peaks based on the constant false-alarm criterion is elaborated. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective. Ulike the existing algorithms available, there is no need to know a dual word a priori and the reconstruction result is more accurate. Moreover, the proposed algorithm is robust to bit errors.

We introduce a Welch FFT segment size selection method for FFT-based wide band spectrum measurement in the context of smart spectrum access (SSA), in which statistical spectrum usage information of primary users (PUs), such as duty cycle (DC), will be exploited by secondary users (SUs). Energy detectors (EDs) based on Welch FFT can detect the presence of PU signals in a broadband environment efficiently, and DC can be estimated properly if a Welch FFT segment size is set suitably. There is a trade-off between detection performance and frequency resolution in terms of the Welch FFT segment size. The optimum segment size depends on signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) which makes practical and optimum segment size setting difficult. For this issue, we previously proposed a segment size selection method employing a relationship between noise floor (NF) estimation output and the segment size without SNR information. It can achieve accurate spectrum awareness at the expense of relatively high computational complexity since it employs exhaustive search to select a proper segment size. In this paper, we propose a segment size selection method that offers reasonable spectrum awareness performance with low computational complexity since limited search is used. Numerical evaluations show that the proposed method can match the spectrum awareness performance of the conventional method with 70% lower complexity or less.

The combination of large-scale antenna arrays and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), which can provide enormous increase of throughput and energy efficiency is a promising key in next generation wireless system (5G). This paper investigates efficient transceiver design to minimize transmit power, subject to users' required data rates and energy harvesting, in large-scale SWIPT system where the base station utilizes a very large number of antennas for transmitting both data and energy to multiple users equipped with time-switching (TS) or power-splitting (PS) receive structures. We first propose the well-known semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and Gaussian randomization techniques to solve the minimum transmit power problems. However, for these large-scale SWIPT problems, the proposed scheme, which is based on conventional SDR method, is not suitable due to its excessive computation costs, and a consensus alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) cannot be directly applied to the case that TS or PS ratios are involved in the optimization problem. Therefore, in the second solution, our first step is to optimize the variables of TS or PS ratios, and to achieve simplified problems. After then, we propose fast algorithms for solving these problems, where the outer loop of sequential parametric convex approximation (SPCA) is combined with the inner loop of ADMM. Numerical simulations show the fast convergence and superiority of the proposed solutions.