This paper investigates the charging control strategy design problem of a large-scale plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) group, where each PEV aims to find an optimal charging strategy to minimize its own cost function. It should be noted that the collective behavior of the group is coupled in the individual cost function, which complicates the design of decentralized charging strategies. To obtain the decentralized charging strategy, a mean-field game (MFG) formulation is proposed where a penalty on collective consensus is embedded and a class of mean-field coupled time-varying stochastic systems is targeted for solving the MFG which involves the charging model of PEVs as a special case. Then, an augmented system with dimension extension and the policy iteration algorithm are proposed to solve the mean-field game problem for the class of mean-field coupled time-varying stochastic systems. Moreover, analysis of the convergence of proposed approach has been studied. Last, simulation is conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed MFG-based charging control strategy and shows that the charging control strategy can achieve desired mean-field state and impact to the power grid can be buffered.

Ultra-densification of radio access network (RAN) is essential to efficiently handle the ever-increasing mobile data traffic. In this paper, a joint multi-layered user clustering and scheduling is proposed as an inter-cluster interference coordination scheme for ultra-dense RAN using cluster-wise distributed MIMO transmission/reception. The proposed joint multi-layered user clustering and scheduling consists of user clustering using the K-means algorithm, user-cluster layering (called multi-layering) based on the interference-offset-distance (IOD), cluster-antenna association on each layer, and layer-wise round-robin-type scheduling. The user capacity, the sum capacity, and the fairness are evaluated by computer simulations to show the effectiveness of the proposed joint multi-layered user clustering and scheduling. Also shown are uplink and downlink capacity comparisons and optimal IOD setting considering the trade-off between inter-cluster interference mitigation and transmission opportunity.

In this paper, hierarchical interference coordination is proposed that suppresses both intra- and inter-cluster interference (ICI) in clustered wireless networks. Assuming transmitters and receivers are equipped with multiple antennas and complete channel state information is shared among all transmitters within the same cluster, interference alignment (IA) is performed that uses nulls to suppress intra-cluster interference. For ICI mitigation, we propose a null-steering precoder designed on the nullspace of a principal eigenvector of the correlated ICI channels, which eliminates a significant amount of ICI power given the exchange of cluster geometry between neighboring clusters. However, as ICI is negligible for the system in which the distance between clusters are large enough, the proposed scheme may not improve the system performance compared with the pure IA scheme that exploits all spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) to increase multiplexing gain without ICI mitigation. For the efficient interference management between intra- and inter-cluster, we analyze the decision criterion that provides an adaptive transmission mode selection between pure IA and proposed ICI reduction in given network environments. Moreover, a low computational complexity based transmission mode switching algorithm is proposed for irregularly distributed networks.

In small cell deployments, the combined usage of user association and inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) is inevitable. This paper investigates the joint optimization of user association and ICIC in the downlink. We first formulate the joint optimization problem as a utility maximization problem. We then employ the logarithmic utility function known as the proportional fair criteria. The optimum user association and the ICIC are derived by solving a convex optimization problem based on the average spectral efficiencies of all users. We propose an iterative algorithm to obtain the optimum solution to this problem. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm for the small cell deployments and shows that the proposed algorithm works well. We also compare the performance of the proposed algorithm based on utility maximization user association with the CRE, and show the superiority of the utility maximization. Furthermore, we show that intra-tier ICIC and inter-tier ICIC can effectively improve the throughput performance according to the conditions. It is also shown that the combined usage of inter-tier ICIC and intra-tier ICIC enhances the throughput performance compared to schemes employing either the inter- or intra-tier ICIC scheme.

Towards furthering the industrial revolution, the concept of a new cellular network began to be drawn up around 2010 as the fifth generation (5G) mobile wireless communication system. One of the main differences between the fourth generation (4G) mobile communication system Long Term Evolution (LTE) and 5G new radio (NR) is the frequency bands utilized. 5G NR assumes higher frequency bands. Effective utilization of the higher frequency bands needs to resolve the technical issue of the larger path-loss. Massive multiple-input multiple-output (Massive MIMO) beamforming (BF) technology contributes to overcome this problem, hence further study of Massive MIMO BF for each frequency band is necessary toward high-performance and easy implementation. In this paper, then, we propose a Massive MIMO method with fully-digital BF based on two-tap precoding for low super high frequency (SHF) band downlink (DL) transmissions (called as Digital FBCP). Additionally, three intersite coordination algorithms for Digital FBCP are presented for multi-site environments and one of the three algorithms is enhanced. It is shown that Digital FBCP achieves better throughput performance than a conventional algorithm with one-tap precoding. Considering performance of intersite coordination as well, it is concluded that Digital FBCP can achieve around 5 Gbps in various practical environments.

Massive MIMO (mMIMO) is a promising technology for smart multimedia and wireless communication fields. In this paper, we investigate pilot allocation problem in two-tier time division duplex (TDD) heterogeneous network (HetNet) with mMIMO. First, we propose a new pilot allocation scheme for maximizing ergodic downlink sum rate of macro users (MUs) and small cell users (SUs), where the uplink pilot overhead and cross-tier interference are jointly considered. Then, we theoretically analyze the formulated problem and propose a low complexity one-dimensional search algorithm to obtain the optimum pilot allocation. In addition, we propose two suboptimal pilot allocation algorithms to simplify the computational process and improve SUs' fairness, respectively. Finally, simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme outperforms that of the traditional schemes.

In order to satisfy the very high traffic demand in crowded hotspot areas and realize adequate security in future fifth-generation networks, this paper studies physical-layer security in the downlink of a two-tier ultra dense heterogeneous network, where a ubiquitous array formed by ultra dense deployed small-cells surrounds a macrocell base station. In this paper, the locations of legitimate users and eavesdroppers are drawn from Poisson point processes. Then, the cumulative distribution functions of the receive signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for legitimate users and eavesdroppers are derived. Further, the average secrecy rate and secrecy coverage probability for each tier as well as for the whole network are investigated. Finally, we analyze the influences on secrecy performance caused by eavesdropper density, transmit power allocation ratio, antenna number allocation ratio, and association area radius.

This paper proposes a proportional fair-based joint optimization method for user association and the bandwidth ratio of protected radio resources exclusively used by pico base stations (BSs) for inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) in heterogeneous networks where low transmission-power pico BSs overlay a high transmission-power macro BS. The proposed method employs an iterative algorithm, in which the user association process for a given bandwidth ratio of protected radio resources and the bandwidth ratio control of protected radio resources for a given user association are applied alternately and repeatedly up to convergence. For user association, we use our previously reported decentralized iterative user association method based on the feedback information of each individual user assisted by a small amount of broadcast information from the respective BSs. Based on numerical results, we show that the proposed method adaptively achieves optimal user association and bandwidth ratio control of protected radio resources, which maximizes the geometric mean user throughput within the macrocell coverage area. The system throughput of the proposed method is compared to that for conventional approaches to show the performance gain.

In this paper, we introduce the new concept of temporal diversity utilization based on asymmetric transmission to minimize network interference in wireless ad-hoc networks with a two-hop half-duplex relaying (HDR) protocol. Asymmetric transmission is an interference-aware backoff technique, in which each communication session (source-relay-destination link) adaptively chooses a certain subset of spectrally-orthogonal data streaming which should be delayed by the duration of one time-slot (i.e., half of one subframe). We design the problem in the HDR scenario by applying the concept of asymmetric transmission, and evaluate the game-theoretical algorithm, called asymmetric transmission game (ATG), to derive the suboptimal solution. We show that ATG is an exact potential game, and derive its convergence and optimality properties. Furthermore, we develop an approximated version of ATG (termed A-ATG) in order to reduce signaling and computational complexity. Numerical results verify that two algorithms proposed show significant synergistic effects when collaborating with the conventional methods in terms of interference coordination. Ultimately, the energy consumption to satisfy the rate requirement is reduced by up to 17.4% compared to the conventional schemes alone.

The layered cell configuration, in which a large number of small cells are set in a macro-cell coverage area, is attracting much attention recently as a promising approach to handle the rapidly increasing mobile data traffic. In this configuration, cells of various sizes, from macro to small, are placed in various locations, so that the variation in the number and the distribution of the users among cells becomes much wider than in conventional macro-cell homogeneous networks. Therefore, even in the layered cell configuration, the users in the cell with many users and low received signal quality may experience low throughput especially at cell edge. This is because such users experience both low spectral efficiency and few radio resources. In order to resolve this issue, a lot of techniques have been proposed such as load balancing and cooperative multi-point transmission. In this paper, we focus on scheduling priority control as a simple solution that can also be used in combination with load balancing and coordinated multi-point transmission. We propose an adaptive scheduling priority control scheme based on the congestion and user distribution of each cell and clarify the effect of the proposed method by computer simulations.

The random deployment of small cell base stations (BSs) causes the coverage areas of neighboring cells to overlap, which increases intercell interference and degrades the system capacity. This paper proposes a new intercell interference management (IIM) scheme to improve the system capacity in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) small cell networks. The proposed IIM scheme consists of both an interference cancellation (IC) technique on the receiver side, and a neural network (NN) based power control algorithm for intercell interference coordination (ICIC) on the transmitter side. In order to improve the system capacity, the NN power control optimizes downlink transmit power while IC eliminates interfering signals from received signals. Computer simulations compare the system capacity of the MIMO network with several ICIC algorithms: the NN, the greedy search, the belief propagation (BP), the distributed pricing (DP), and the maximum power, all of which can be combined with IC reception. Furthermore, this paper investigates the application of a multi-layered NN structure called deep learning and its pre-training scheme, into the mobile communication field. It is shown that the performance of NN is better than that of BP and very close to that of greedy search. The low complexity of the NN algorithm makes it suitable for IIM. It is also demonstrated that combining IC and sectorization of BSs acquires high capacity gain owing to reduced interference.

We propose an inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) method that employs inter-cell coordinated transmission power control (TPC) based on inter-cell interference power in addition to conventional received signal power-based TPC in the cellular uplink. We assume orthogonal multiple-access as is used in 3GPP LTE. In the proposed method, an ICIC effect similar to that for conventional fractional frequency reuse (FFR) is obtained. This is achieved by coordinating the allowable inter-cell interference power level at the appropriate frequency blocks within the system bandwidth among neighboring cells in a semi-static manner. Different from conventional FFR, since all users within a cell can access all the frequency blocks, the reduction in multiuser diversity gain is abated. Computer simulation results show that the proposed method enhances both the cell-edge and average user throughput simultaneously compared to conventional universal frequency reuse (UFR) and FFR.

The deployment of small cells is one of the most effective means to cope with the traffic explosion of cellular mobile systems. However, a small cell system increases the inter-cell interference, which limits the capacity and degrades the cell-edge user throughput. Inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), such as fractional frequency reuse (FFR), is a well-known scheme that autonomously mitigates inter-cell interference. In the Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, the three-dimensional (3D) beamforming, which combines conventional horizontal beamforming and vertical beamforming, has been gaining increasing attention. This paper proposes a novel centralized ICIC scheme that controls the direction of narrow 3D beam for each frequency band of each base station. The centralized controller collects information from the base stations and calculates sub-optimum combinations of narrow beams so as to maximize the proportional fair (PF) utility of all users. This paper describes the throughput of the new centralized ICIC scheme as evaluated by computer simulations and shows it has a significant gain in both average user throughput and cell-edge user throughput compared with the conventional ICIC scheme. This paper also investigates the feasibility of the scheme by assessing its throughput performance in a realistic deployment scenario.

Collaborative business has been increasingly developing with the environment of globalization and advanced information technologies. In a collaboration environment with multiple organizations, participants from different organizations always have different views about modeling the overall business process due to different knowledge and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, flexible support, privacy preservation and process reuse are important issues that should be considered in business process management across organizational boundaries. This paper presents a novel approach of modeling interorganizational business process for collaboration. Our approach allows for modeling loosely coupled interorganizational business process considering different views of organizations. In the proposed model, organizations have their own local process views of modeling business process instead of sharing pre-defined global processes. During process cooperation, local process of an organization can be invisible to other organizations. Further, we propose the coordination mechanisms for different local process views to detect incompatibilities among organizations. We illustrate our proposed approach by a case study of interorganizational software development collaboration.

Mobility load balancing (MLB) is a key technology for self-organization networks (SONs). In this paper, we explore the mobility load balancing problem and propose a unified cell specific offset adjusting algorithm (UCSOA) which more accurately adjusts the largely uneven load between neighboring cells and is easily implemented in practice with low computing complexity and signal overhead. Moreover, we evaluate the UCSOA algorithm in two different traffic conditions and prove that the UCSOA algorithm can get the lower call blocking rates and handover failure rates. Furthermore, the interdependency of the proposed UCSOA algorithm's performance and that of the inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) algorithm is explored. A self-organization soft frequency reuse scheme is proposed. It demonstrates UCSOA algorithm and ICIC algorithm can obtain a positive effect for each other and improve the network performance in LTE system.

This paper presents the design and proof-of-concept validation of a novel network-assisted spectrum coordination (NASCOR) service for improved radio coexistence in future shared spectrum bands. The basic idea is to create an overlay network service for dissemination of spectrum usage information between otherwise independent radio devices and systems, enabling them to implement decentralized spectrum coexistence policies that reduce interference and improve spectrum packing efficiency. The proposed method is applicable to unlicensed band and shared spectrum systems in general (including femtocells), but is particularly relevant to emerging TV white spaces and cognitive radio systems which are still in need of scalable and accurate solutions for both primary-to-secondary and secondary-to-secondary coordination. Key challenges in enabling a network layer spectrum coordination service are discussed along with the description of our system architecture and a detailed case-study for a specific example of spectrum coordination: client-AP association optimization in dense networks. Performance gains are evaluated through large-scale simulations with multiple overlapping networks, each consisting of 15-35 access points and 50-250 clients in a 0.5×0.5 sq.km. urban setting. Results show an average of 150% improvement in random deployments and upto 7× improvements in clustered deployments for the least-performing client throughputs with modest reductions in the mean client throughputs.

In this paper, a multicast concept for Device-to-Device (D2D) communication underlaying a cellular infrastructure is investigated. To increase the overall capacity and improve resource utilization, a novel interference coordination scheme is proposed. The proposed scheme includes three steps. First, in order to mitigate the interference from D2D multicast transmission to cellular networks (CNs), a dynamic power control scheme is proposed that can determine the upper bound of D2D transmitter power based on the location of Base Station (BS) and areas of adjacent cells from the coverage area of D2D multicast group. Next, an interference limited area control scheme that reduces the interference from CNs to each D2D multicast receiver is proposed. The proposed scheme does not allow cellular equipment (CUE) located in the interference limited area to reuse the same resources as the D2D multicast group. Then two resource block (RB) allocation rules are proposed to select the appropriate RBs from a candidate RB set for D2D multicast group. From the simulation results, it is confirmed that the proposed schemes improve the performance of the hybrid system compared to the conventional ways.

This work investigates the cell range expansion (CRE) possible with time-domain multiplexing inter-cell interference coordination (TDM ICIC) in heterogeneous cellular networks (HCN). CRE is proposed to enable a user to connect to a picocell even when it is not the cell with the strongest received power. However, the users in the expanded region suffer severe interference from the macrocells. To alleviate the cross-tier interference, TDM ICIC is proposed to improve the SIR of pico users. In contrast to previous studies on CRE with TDM ICIC, which rely mostly on simulations, we give theoretical analysis results for different types of users in HCN with CRE and TDM ICIC under the Poisson Point Process (PPP) model, especially for the users in the expanded region of picocells. We analyze the outage probability and average ergodic rate based on the connect probability and statistical distance we obtain in advance. Furthermore, we analyze the optimal ratio of almost blank subframes (ABS) and bias factor of picocells in terms of the network fairness, which is useful in the parameter design of a two-tier HCN.

This paper proposes a simple decentralized cell association method for heterogeneous networks, where low transmission-power pico or femto base stations (BSs) overlay onto a high transmission-power macro BS. The focus of this investigation is on the downlink and the purpose of cell association is to achieve better user fairness, in other words, to increase the minimum average user throughput (worst user throughput). In the proposed method, an appropriate cell association for all users within a cell is achieved in an iterative manner based on the feedback information of each individual user assisted by a small amount of broadcast information from the respective BSs. The proposed method does not require cooperation between BSs. Furthermore, the proposed method is applicable to cases of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC) between macro and pico/femto BSs through the use of protected radio resources exclusively used by the pico/femto BSs. Based on numerical results, we show that the proposed method adaptively achieves better cell association for all users according to the user location distributions compared to the conventional cell range expansion (CRE) method. The advantage of the proposed method over CRE is further enhanced in an ICIC scenario.

In Long-Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, heterogeneous networks are important to further improve the system throughput per unit area. In heterogeneous network deployment, low power nodes such as picocells are overlaid onto macrocells. In the downlink, the combined usage of inter-cell interference coordination (ICIC), which is a technique that reduces the severe interference from macrocells by reducing the transmission power or stopping the transmission from the macrocells, and cell range expansion (CRE), which is a technique that expands the cell radius of picocells by biasing the received signal power, is very effective in improving the system and cell-edge user throughput. In this paper, we consider two types of ICIC. The first one reduces the transmission power from the macrocells (referred to as reduced power ICIC) and the second one stops the transmission from the macrocells (referred to as zero power ICIC). This paper investigates the impact of the reduction in the transmission power when using reduced power ICIC and the restriction on the modulation scheme caused by the reduction in the transmission power when using reduced power ICIC on the user throughput performance with the CRE offset value as a parameter. In addition, the throughput performance when applying reduced power ICIC is compared to that when applying zero power ICIC. Simulation results show that the user throughput with reduced power ICIC is not sensitive to the protected subframe ratio compared to that with zero power ICIC even if the modulation scheme is restricted to only QPSK in the protected subframes. This indicates that reduced power ICIC is more robust than zero power ICIC for non-optimum protected subframe ratios.