CAREER LTE · Capacity and Energy Efficiency Limits of Wireless Communications for Heterogeneous Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) Deployment

Capacity and Energy Efficiency Limits of Wireless Communications for Heterogeneous Long Term Evolution Advanced (LTE-A) Deployment

Wireless communication technologies have huge socio-economic impacts, as virtually all business as well as public sectors of the world are today dependent on constant Internet connectivity and service powered by wireless networks. For the individual users, the amount of requirement on mobile data service has been growing exponentially in the recent years, and the trend is expected to continue in the foreseeable future. This poses challenges to research and innovation in the design and development of new communication solutions for the upcoming fifth generation (5G) wireless access, where the performance objectives consists of not only great data rate improvement but also high cost and energy efficiency. European FP7 Marie Curie IOF project Career LTE (project number: 329313) is part of the research efforts addressing the challenges. The project has its scientific objective of gaining new fundamental knowledge and understanding of capacity and energy efficiency of wireless systems. The project also pursues the integration of research outcome with performance engineering in planning and optimization of mobile network deployment and operation. Moreover, via training and knowledge development, the project aims at fostering European human capital in the domain of information and communication technologies (ICT), as well as promoting the career development of the individual researcher. The scientific work within the project has been structured in three work packages (WPs). In WP 1 “New concepts for analyzing capacity limits of wireless communications”, the work has focused on the fundamental research of analyzing various aspects of the achievable capacity of wireless communications. The research outcomes have led to mathematical models to understand the performance limits from an information-theory perspective, as well as optimization approaches for numerically computing the achievable performance improvement enabled by using new communications techniques (more specifically, cooperative transmission and interference cancellation) for wireless networking. For WP 2 “Fundamental performance and energy trade-off in wireless networks”, the research objective is to deliver analysis and tools for optimizing the inherent trade-off between the energy consumption for meeting the required amount of data and other performance metrics such as time delay. The research work has led to new optimization notions and computational methods that allow for characterizing and optimizing the trade-off for networks of arbitrary topology. A key strength of the methods is scalability, that is, the methods can be used for optimization of large-size networks. As a result, the methods are highly useful for dense network deployment that is expected to take place in practice in the near future. WP3 “Deployment and management of green heterogeneous LTE-A” addresses energy efficiency in heterogeneous networks (HetNets) consisting in macro cells and small cells. The use of the latter is of high importance to achieve cost efficiency as well as energy reduction. For HetNets with dense deployment, interference becomes the main performance-limiting factor. The achievements of the project consist of analytical models for accurately modeling the in-terference between the cells, a comprehensive framework for optimizing the installation and configuration of small cells, and computational algorithms for optimizing HetNet deployment for high energy efficiency. The long-term benefits of the project consist in 1) providing the research and engineering community with the theoretical basis for inventing and designing new technological solutions, 2) influencing the standardization efforts for next-generation networks, and 3) providing the network system vendors and operators with concepts for improving resource efficiency and sustainability of the digital infrastructure of a knowledge-intensive society. In addition to its scientific contributions, the Career LTE project has carried out training of the project’s researcher in order to expand the expertise domain and to gain complementary skills, enabling the researcher to accomplish the project’s research tasks and to address future research challenges. During the project, the training has provided the researcher with new knowledge within a number of areas of relevance, including information theory concepts with network coding, analytical analysis of various fairness measures, age of information, energy-saving techniques in wireless networks, and mathematical programming concepts for energy-efficiency. Training activities for developing complementary skills have focused on research presentation (including skills for popular-science communications), writing research project proposals, acting as expert for reviewing proposals, conference organization, and supervision of junior researchers. These training activities are envisaged to provide the researcher with the necessary experience and skills for pursuing a successful career after the project. The training has also the effect of fostering the human capital within the European Research Area for leading research addressing future technological and social challenges.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union