Candidate
Jian Qiao
Title
Enabling Millimeter Wave Communication for 5G Cellular Networks: MAC-layer Perspective
Supervisor
Sherman Shen and Jon Mark (Adjunct)
Abstract
Data traffic among mobile devices increases dramatically with emerging high-speed multi- media applications such as uncompressed video streaming. Many new applications beyond personal communications involve tens or even hundreds of billions wireless devices, such as wireless watch, e-health sensors, and wireless glass. The number of wireless devices and the data rates will continue to grow exponentially. Quantitative evidences forecast that total data rate by 2020 will be 1000 times of current 4G data rate. Next generation wireless networks need fundamental changes to satisfy the overwhelming capacity demands. Millimeter wave (mmWave) communication with huge available bandwidth is a very promising solution for next generation wireless networks to overcome the global band- width shortage at saturated microwave spectrum. The large available bandwidth can be directly translated into high capacity. mmWave communication has several propagation characteristics including strong pathloss, atmospheric and rain absorption, low diffraction around obstacles and penetration through objects. These propagation characteristics create challenges for next generation wireless networks to support various kinds of emerging applications with different QoS requirements. Our research focuses on how to effectively and efficiently exploit the large available mmWave bandwidth to achieve high capacity demand while overcoming these challenges on QoS provisioning for various kinds of applications.
This thesis focuses on MAC protocol design and analysis for mmWave communication to provide required capacity and QoS to support various kinds of applications in next generation wireless networks. Specifically, from the transmitter/receiver perspective, multi-user beamforming based on codebook is conducted to determine best transmission/reception beams to increase network capacity considering the mutual interferences among concurrent links. From the channel perspective, both interfering and non-interfering concurrent links are scheduled to operate simultaneously to exploit spatial reuse and improve network capacity. Link outage problem resulting from the limited diffraction capability and low penetration capability of mmWave band is addressed for quality provisioning by enabling multi-hop transmission to replace the link in outage (for low-mobility scenarios) and buffer design with dynamic bandwidth allocation among all the users in the whole coverage area (for high-mobility scenarios). From the system perspective, system structure, network architecture, and candidate MAC are investigated and novel backoff mechanism for CS- MA/CA is proposed to give more transmission opportunity to faraway nodes than nearby nodes in order to achieve better fairness and higher network capacity. In this thesis, we formulate each problem mentioned above as an optimization problem with the proposed algorithms to solve it. Extensive analytical and simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithms in several aspects, such as network capacity, energy efficiency, link connectivity.