Efficient power control via pricing in wireless data networks

In cognitive radio network (CRN), the utilities results in Nash equilibrium of power control game without using pricing are inefficient. In this paper, a distributed power control algorithm is proposed to improve the utilities of both primary user (PU) and secondary users (SUs) in the CRN based on game theoretic framework. A distributed power control is a non-cooperative power control game, and the quality of service (QoS) received by PU and SUs terminals are referred to as the utility function. PU and SUs act as decision makers in the game and they maximize their utilities in a distributed fashion. We introduce a new pricing function for SUs as a function of transmit power and square amount of interference in order to guide SUs to an efficient Nash equilibrium point. Analysis of the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium for the proposed power control game with pricing is presented. Simulation results show that the proposed power control algorithm via a new pricing function maximizes the number of SUs access the unused spectrum, and improves the utilities of PU and SUs.

In this paper, energy efficient power control for small cells underlaying a macro cellular network is investigated. We formulate the power control problem in self-organizing small cell networks as a non-cooperative game, and propose a distributed energy efficient power control scheme, which allows the small base stations (SBSs) to take individual decisions for attaining the Nash equilibrium (NE) with minimum information exchange. Specially, in the non-cooperative power control game, a non-convex optimization problem is formulated for each SBS to maximize their energy efficiency (EE). By exploiting the properties of parameter-free fractional programming and the concept of perspective function, the non-convex optimization problem for each SBS is transformed into an equivalent constrained convex optimization problem. Then, the constrained convex optimization problem is converted into an unconstrained convex optimization problem by exploiting the mixed penalty function method. The inequality constraints are eliminated by introducing the logarithmic barrier functions and the equality constraint is eliminated by introducing the quadratic penalty function. We also theoretically show the existence and the uniqueness of the NE in the non-cooperative power control game. Simulation results show remarkable improvements in terms of EE by using the proposed scheme.

With the convergence of mobile and fixed communication networks, mobile users are increasingly demanding applications offering the same quality of service (QoS) as provided by wired access. High-speed time division duplex access mode is typical of high-speed mobile communication systems in order to simultaneously handle real-time, interactive, and best effort traffic classes. This paper proposes a medium access control (MAC) protocol that makes efficient use of radio resources for access. The proposed protocol, named dynamic-time division duplexing (D-TDD), is based on a multiple-access TDD air interface capable of supporting uplink and downlink traffic asymmetries. Validation of the D-TDD good performance was achieved by comparison with an ideal scheme and a different MAC protocol recently proposed in the literature on this subject.

Spectrum scarcity is a major challenge in wireless communications systems requiring efficient usage and utilization. Cognitive radio network (CRN) is found as a promising technique to solve this problem of spectrum scarcity. It allows licensed and unlicensed users to share the same licensed spectrum band. Interference resulting from cognitive radios (CRs) has undesirable effects on quality of service (QoS) of both licensed and unlicensed systems where it causes degradation in received signal-to-noise ratio (SIR) of users. Power control is one of the most important techniques that can be used to mitigate interference and guarantee QoS in both systems. In this paper, we develop a new approach of a distributed power control for CRN based on utility and pricing. QoS of CR user is presented as a utility function via pricing and a distributed power control as a non-cooperative game in which users maximize their net utility (utility-price). We define the price as a real function of transmit power to increase pricing charge of the farthest CR users. We prove that the power control game proposed in this study has Nash Equilibrium as well as it is unique. The obtained results show that the proposed power control algorithm based on a new utility function has a significant reduction in transmit power consumption and high improvement in speed of convergence.

We present a game-theoretic treatment of distributed power control in CDMA wireless systems using outage probabilities. We first prove that the noncooperative power control game considered admits a unique Nash equilibrium (NE) for uniformly strictly convex pricing functions and under some technical assumptions on the SIR threshold levels. We then analyze global convergence of continuous-time as well as discrete-time synchronous and asynchronous iterative power update algorithms to the unique NE of the game. Furthermore, we show that a stochastic version of the discrete-time update scheme, which models the uncertainty due to quantization and estimation errors, converges almost surely to the unique NE point. We finally investigate and demonstrate the convergence and robustness properties of these update schemes through simulation studies.

A game-theoretic approach for studying power control in multiple-access networks with transmission delay constraints is proposed. A non-cooperative power control game is considered in which each user seeks to choose a transmit power that maximizes its own utility while satisfying the user's delay requirements. The utility function measures the number of reliable bits transmitted per joule of energy and the user's delay constraint is modeled as an upper bound on the delay outage probability. The Nash equilibrium for the proposed game is derived, and its existence and uniqueness are proved. Using a large-system analysis, explicit expressions for the utilities achieved at equilibrium are obtained for the matched filter, decorrelating and minimum mean square error multiuser detectors. The effects of delay constraints on the users' utilities (in bits/Joule) and network capacity (i.e., the maximum number of users that can be supported) are quantified.

This is the second issue of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC) published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The first issue was published ahead of time and presented some excellent review papers from experts in the field. We received great feedback from a number of colleagues about its content and we promise to continue producing excellent issues in the future. If you did not receive your sample copy of the inaugural issue, please let me or any of the regional editors know to arrange to send you a copy. We have selected seven papers to appear in this second issue. These papers span a good range of topics in the area. The first is a review paper by Ralph and Aghvami. They discuss the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) architecture and characteristics. Then, they investigate the devices that are supported by WAP as well as the drivers and services. These services include quality of service, security, billing, interoperability, and performance engineering. The variety of media types combined with the diversity of Internet connection characteristics raises momentous challenges to the achievement of ubiquitous access to Internet multimedia content. The second paper, by Margaritidis and Polyzos, addresses issues related to this topic. They identify the importance of adaptation to this category. Then, they examine several important factors that influence the design and optimization of the adaptation architecture. In conclusion, they describe current commercial solutions and future trends in application adaptation in conjunction with recent developments towards wireless access to the Internet. The third paper, by Havinga and Smit, discusses also wireless multimedia networking, but focuses more on energy efficiency. The authors identify three key problems and provide possible solutions to overcome them. The efficient management of power-controlled cellular wireless systems is necessary for their deployment success. Power control can be used as a platform for radio resource management and is important for channel fading as well as providing QoS to individual users. Xiao, Shroff and Chong review the developments of distributed power control and related resource management problems in cellular wireless systems. The discussion is concentrated on achieving high efficiency for a power-controlled system while preventing the system from failure. They then review power and rate control schemes proposed for wireless data, and present a framework for utility-based power control as a possible candidate for distributed power control of multimedia wireless systems. In the fifth paper, Arslan and Bottomley review commonly used approaches to channel estimation. This is necessary in adaptive receiver designs used in narrowband and wireless digital communication systems. They consider both time-invariant and time-varying channels in their discussion. They also provide a number of applications that will make use of this standard. On the other hand, Tepedelenliolu, Abdi, Giannakis and Kaveh talk about estimation of Doppler spread and signal strength in wireless systems. They concentrate on estimating the received signal strength, mobile velocity, and other related statistical channel parameters that apply to handoff and adaptive transmission. They provide comparison of the presented schemes based on their modeling and simulation results. Finally, Annamalai and Tellambura present a research paper discussing three new exponential-type bounds derived using the Cauchy–Schwarz bounding technique. They show that these new bounds are found to be tight and useful for a number of applications. They compare these bounds to other well-known exponential type bounds and prove that these perform at least comparable or tighter. We hope that you will enjoy reading this issue and welcome any comments to any of the four editors listed below. Again, we welcome all of you to contribute and encourage your colleagues and libraries to subscribe to this fine publication.

Cognitive radio (CR) networks allow secondary users (SUs) to opportunistically access licensed spectrum, thus providing efficient use of radio resources. Different studies carried out on CR networks have focused on the procedure of spectrum handoff of SUs such as the data transmission in a communication that can be carried out in different channels. In this paper, we consider cellular networks enhanced with facilities for CR communication where a user with a call in progress moves across neighbouring cells, that is, the so‐called inter‐cell handoff. Our model assumes that the cell gives priority to inter‐cell handoff calls over the calls originating within it. A finite queue is used in every cell for SUs, and a fixed number of buffer slots are reserved for the inter‐handoff SU calls. With these considerations, we study the transmission performance of SUs by using Markov chains‐based modelling approach. The numerical analysis is validated by simulation experiments. We also suggest a fuzzy logic‐based hybrid decision‐making algorithm to select the best solution for inter‐handoff prioritisation. The goal is to optimise the transmission performance of SUs by leveraging their requirements on service completion throughput and waiting time in each cell. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Scheduling algorithms are of utmost importance in WiMAX for efficient use of radio resources. A scheduling algorithm should take into account the WiMAX QoS classes and service requirements. It should also provide high throughput. In this paper, we propose a review of scheduling algorithms proposed for WiMAX. We focus on the real-time Polling Service (rtPS) QoS class. NS-2 simulations show interesting results. We highlight a problem that may exist with the WiMAX rtPS QoS class and we provide solutions for it. Simulation results concerning proposed WiMAX schedulers are discussed. We propose an enhancement of the maximum Signal-to-Interference Ratio (mSIR) scheduler, called modified maximum Signal-to-Interference Ratio (mmSIR). We show through extensive simulations that this enhancement provides better mean sojourn time in addition to an improvement in throughput.

This letter proposes an efficient small data transmission scheme in the narrow band (NB)-Internet of Things (IoT) system. For the efficient use of radio resources, the proposed scheme enables devices in an idle state to transmit a small data packet without the radio resource control connection setup process. This can improve the maximum number of supportable devices in the NB-IoT system which has insufficient radio resources. Numerical results have shown that the proposed scheme can increase the maximum number of supportable devices by about 60% compared with the conventional scheme.

In this paper, we propose a cross-layer design of packet level cooperation for wireless LANs that support rate adaptation. While keeping compatibility with legacy wireless LANs, distributed control of multi-hop packet transmission is enabled without pre-negotiation of routing or pairing. These features are provided by prioritization scheme based on IEEE 802.11e EDCF in which we set the parameters according to the measured link condition at each terminal. Relaying packets with high transmission rate makes much efficient use of radio resource, and it leads not only to improve performance of the total system, but also to overcome the fairness issue known in rate adaptation, where the terminals with good link conditions cannot gain enough resource because of the time consumed by low data rate transmission. These advantages are confirmed through computer simulations considering packet error rate at each transmission which is assumed by receiving power calculated from the distance between source, relay, and destination terminals. Furthermore, we also discuss about the fairness between cooperation-enabled and legacy terminals when they coexist in the same system, in order to make gradual deployment feasible.

Scheduling algorithms are very important in WiMAX for the efficient use of radio resources. However, the standard does not specify which scheduling algorithm(s) should be used. A scheduling algorithm should take into account the WiMAX QoS classes and service requirements. The scheduling algorithm also has to taken into account other models of the WiMAX system such as power saving and pricing models. In this paper, we propose schedulers for some QoS classes. These schedulers are designed to include our WiMAX pricing model that we proposed in previous works in our WiMAX framework. We show that the scheduler has to take into account the pricing model used. Moreover, we show that the optimization of resources usage associated with a suitable pricing scheme provides higher revenue for the operator by comparing our sophisticated pricing scheme with a basic one.

Fifth Generation (5G) wireless systems are expected to connect an avalanche of “smart” objects disseminated from the largest “Smart City” to the smallest “Smart Home”. In this vision, Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) is deemed to play a fundamental role in the Internet of Things (IoT) arena providing a large coherent infrastructure and a wide wireless connectivity to the devices. However, since LTE-A was originally designed to support high data rates and large data size, novel solutions are required to enable an efficient use of radio resources to convey small data packets typically exchanged by IoT applications in “smart” environments. On the other hand, the typically high energy consumption required by cellular communications is a serious obstacle to large scale IoT deployments under cellular connectivity as in the case of Smart City scenarios. Network-assisted Device-to-Device (D2D) communications are considered as a viable solution to reduce the energy consumption for the devices. The particular approach presented in this paper consists in appointing one of the IoT smart devices as a collector of all data from a cluster of objects using D2D links, thus acting as an aggregator toward the eNodeB. By smartly adapting the Modulation and Coding Scheme (MCS) on the communication links, we will show it is possible to maximize the radio resource utilization as a function of the total amount of data to be sent. A further benefit that we will highlight is the possibility to reduce the transmission power when a more robust MCS is adopted. A comprehensive performance evaluation in a wide set of scenarios will testify the achievable gains in terms of energy efficiency and resource utilization in the envisaged D2D-based IoT data collection.

This paper discusses load balancing architecture among heterogeneous wireless networks (HWNs). Load balancing is an important issue for efficient use of radio resources not only in a single network but among different radio access technologies (RATs) in HWNs. Cooperative management of radio resources among heterogeneous RATs is considered to reduce imbalance of utilization of radio resources and enhance availability of the system. For effective load balancing, we define a ldquocommunityrdquo concept, in which radio resources of various RATs are managed together. Radio resource management functional entities of RATs cooperatively work in the community. We present a load balancing architecture applied to 3GPP LTE, WiBro and WLAN and describe architectural considerations. We also present a straightforward load balancing algorithm that takes account of bandwidth usage and received signal to noise ratio. The load balancing algorithm of community radio resource management enhances utilization of radio resources and reduces call blocking probability of individual RATs in the community and further enhances average performance of the whole community.

With cellular phones mass-market consumer items, the next frontier is mobile multimedia communications. This situation raises the question of power control for information sources other than voice. To explore this issue, we use the concepts and mathematics of microeconomics and game theory. In this context, the quality of service of a telephone call is referred to as the and the distributed power control problem for a CDMA telephone is a noncooperative game. The power control algorithm corresponds to a strategy that has a locally optimum operating point referred to as a Nash equilibrium. The telephone power control algorithm is also efficient in the terminology of game theory. When we apply the same approach to power control in wireless data transmissions, we find that the corresponding strategy, while locally optimum, is not Pareto efficient. Relative to the telephone algorithm, there are other algorithms that produce higher utility for at least one terminal, without decreasing the utility for any other terminal. This paper presents one such algorithm. The algorithm includes a price function, proportional to the transmitter power. The price acts as a tax on the utility of a transmission. When terminals adjust their power levels to maximize the net utility (utility price), they arrive at lower power levels and higher utility than they achieve when they individually strive to maximize utility.