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5G Technologies
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The fifth-generation (5G) communications will penetrate almost every sector of our society and create an all-dimensional, user-centered information ecosystem. It is envisioned that 5G will provide users with radio access speeds matching the wire counterparts and "zero" latency user experiences, and also enable massive connectivity accommodating tens-of-billions of mobile devices. To be precise, the mission of 5G is to enable mobile broadband, massive machine-type communications, and ultra-fast and ultra-reliable communications. One key research thrust in our research is to deign techniques and study network performance targeting a wide range of 5G enabling technologies including massive MIMO, millimeter-wave communications (mmWave), wireless powered communications (WPC), content delivery networks, mobile edge computing, and autonomous-vehicle positioning. Selected recent publications in this area are summarized as follows.
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Wirelessly Powered Communications: The unique near far problem in WPC due to the strong power-transfer (PT) link and weak information-transfer (IT) link has been tackled in [5G1] by devising a novel analog spatial cancellation receiver which can achieve the maximum multiplexing gain of the weak IT link in the presence of the strong PT interference link. Moreover, to extend the ranges as well as simultaneously power a large number of sensors, a novel architecture for backscatter communication networks was recently proposed in [5G2] where tags are powered by distributed power beacons (PBs) instead of readers.
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Wireless Content Delivery Networks: A novel content adaptive modulation and coding scheme is proposed in [5G3] to align the spatial signals such that those carries identical contents can be harnessed as information signals rather than inference to improve the reliability of wireless content delivery. Cashing popular content at edge devices is a popular approach for low-latency content delivery. The optimal strategies for content placement remains largely unknown and were investigated in [5G4].
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mmWave and Massive MIMO Communications: A new hybrid beamforming design via an invented mathematical tool called Kronecker decomposition is proposed in [5G5] together with a matching low-complexity channel estimation scheme customized for the hybrid architecture. Besides, we have also looked into the large-scale mmWave networks in urban environment [5G6] where tools from random lattices has been exploited to study the impact of the building blockage on the coverage performance of heterogeneous networks.
[5G1] G. Zhu and K. Huang, “Analog spatial cancellation for tackling the near-far problem in wirelessly powered communications”, IEEE J. Sel. Area on Commun., vol. 34, no. 12, pp. 3566–3576, Dec. 2016.
[5G2] K. Han and K. Huang, “Wirelessly Powered Backscatter Communication Networks: Modeling, Coverage and Capacity”, IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun., vol. 16, no. 4, pp. 2548-2561, Apr 2017.
[5G3] D. Liu and K. Huang, "Mitigating Interference in Content Delivery Networks by Spatial Signal Alignment: The Approach of Shot-Noise Ratio”, IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun. vol. 17, no. 4, pp 2305-2318, 2018. (ArXiv)
[5G4] J. Wen, K. Huang, S. Yang and V. O. K. Li, "Cache-Enabled Heterogeneous Cellular Networks: Optimal Tier-Level Content Placement," IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun., vol. 16, no. 9, pp. 5939-5952, Sep. 2017.
[5G5] G. Zhu, K. Huang, V. K. N. Lau, B. Xia, X. Li and S. Zhang, “Hybrid beamforming via the Kronecker decomposition for the millimeter-wave massive MIMO systems”, IEEE J. Sel. Area on Commun., vol. 35, no. 9, pp. 2097–2114, Sep. 2017.
[5G6] K. Han, K. Huang, Y. Cui, and Y. Wu “The Connectivity of Millimeter-Wave Networks in Urban Environments Modeled Using Random Lattices”, accepted to IEEE Trans. on Wireless Commun. (ArXiv)