uwicore. Ubiquitous Wireless Communications Research Laboratory
 
 

Beyond 3G wireless systems

Uwicore has extensive experience on radio resource management (RRM) and MAC policies for mobile communication systems. In particular, Uwicore has been working on adaptive policies that optimise the user-perceived QoS levels while improving the radio resources efficiency, and hence the system capacity. Uwicore has evolved its research capabilities in this area to heterogeneous beyond 3G wireless systems, sometimes referred as well as 4G systems, where various radio access technologies can simultaneously be available in a given area, and adequate policies to define over which radio access technology is conveyed each transmission need to be designed. In the context of management and optimization of beyond 3G wireless systems, Uwicore has been working on various topics:

  1. Adaptive and cross-layer RRM techniques. Uwicore activities in this field have mainly concentrated on the design and optimisation of Link Adaptation (LA) policies, also referred as adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) scheme. In particular, Uwicore has studied LA's operation and adequate configuration under various system operations, and has proposed LA policies optimised for multimedia transmissions.

  2. Resources distribution policies. To adequately optimise the available radio resources based on the experienced channel quality conditions, Uwicore has worked on cross-layer channel assignment policies that exploit the information of link quality conditions in previous transmissions to minimise system interference through implicit co-channel cells cooperation. In addition, Uwicore has also been working on channel distribution policies based on the actual user/service QoS demands in multi-service scenarios. These proposals, based on bankruptcy policy, guarantee an efficient use of scarce radio resource under heterogeneous traffic conditions.

  3. Beyond 3G heterogeneous wireless simulation platform. Uwicore has developed over various years the SPHERE (Simulation Platform for HEterogeneous wiREless systems) simulation platform, which emulates in parallel, and at the slot level, various radio access technologies. SPHERE's capability to simultaneously and accurately emulate the radio interface of various wireless systems represents a unique opportunity for Uwicore to investigate on Common Radio Resource Management (CRRM) policies.

  4. Common Radio Resource Management techniques. Uwicore activities in this field have concentrated on initial Radio Access Technology (RAT) selection techniques. In particular, it has proposed various utility-based policies designed to optimise the user-perceived QoS levels while efficiently employing all radio access technologies. The aim is to define policies that consider each service/user requests when deciding the adequate RAT over which to convey a new transmission; this approach ensures the operator's capability to use all its deployed RATs and avoid over-loading the RAT with higher data rates. Uwicore is also working on extending the resource distribution policies designed for multi-service single-RAT environments to the case of multi-service multi-RAT deployment scenarios.