Online Positioning of a Drone-Mounted Base Station in Emergency Scenarios

—Wireless communication networks provide a critical infrastructure, particularly in emergency situations due to disruptive events such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks. However, in these kinds of scenarios part of the network may no longer be operational and a traffic hotspot may emerge, which may result in coverage and/or capacity...

An Intriguing Relation Between the Power Consumption and Number of Antenna Elements in Multi-Beam Phased Arrays

An improved system-level power consumption model (PCM) for 5G base station multi-beam phased-array transmit architectures is developed. Using this model, it is shown that an optimum number of antenna elements of the array exists with respect to the total power consumption. The proposed model is benchmarked against a recent study which is shown...

Application-level performance of cross-layer scheduling for social VR in 5G

Social VR aims at enabling people located at different places to communicate and interact with each other in a natural way. It poses extremely strong throughput and latency requirements on the underlying communication networks. This paper investigates the potential of using cross-layer design approaches for radio access scheduling in order to...

Assessment of 5G RAN Features for Integrated Services Provisioning in Smart Cities

In a 5G Radio Access Network (RAN), different features are offered as solutions to serve traffic with diverse characteristics and requirements, including flexible numerology, (non-)pre-emptive mini-slot based scheduling and network slicing. In this paper, we present an extensive simulation-based assessment of the relative merit of these distinct...

The Many Faces of Edge Intelligence

Edge Intelligence (EI) is an emerging computing and communication paradigm that enables Artificial Intelligence (AI) functionality at the network edge. In this article, we highlight EI as an emerging and important field of research, discuss the state of research, analyze research gaps and highlight important research challenges with the...

5G++ FlexiCell: 5G location-based context-aware agile manufacturing

Manufacturing machines need to be retooled approximately 15 times per week and in the future even more often because of decreasing batch sizes and increasing short-cyclic demands. Collaborative robots promise to offer a versatile automation approach for priorly manual tasks in small and medium-sized enterprises. However, their configuration...

Site-Specific Ultra-Low-Sidelobe Phased Array Topologies for Sparse Areas of Particular Shape

Optimal design of uniformly-fed aperiodic millimeter-wave phased array topologies for site-specific and quasi interference-free operation is presented. Several use cases with different number of line-of-sight cells in the close vicinity of the base station, and for various widths and shapes of the cells, are analyzed. The arrays are synthesized...

Reference Network and Localization Architecture for Smart Manufacturing Based on 5G

5G promises to shift Industry 4.0 to the next level by allowing flexible production. However, many communication standards are used throughout a production site, which will stay so in the foreseeable future. Furthermore, localization of assets will be equally valuable in order to get to a higher level of automation. This paper proposes a...

Privacy for 5G-Supported Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks allow billions of vehicular users to be connected to report and exchange real-time data for offering various services, such as navigation, ride-hailing, smart parking, traffic monitoring, and vehicular digital forensics. Fifth generation (5G) is a new radio access technology with greater coverage, accessibility, and higher...

Driving forces for Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) IoT integration in 5G

The emergence of Multi-Access Edge Computing (MEC) technology aims to extend cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the wireless access networks, i.e., closer to the end-users. Thus, MEC-enabled 5G wireless systems are envisaged to offer real-time, low-latency, and high-bandwidth access to the radio network resources. Thus, MEC allows...

Performance Modelling and Assessment for Social VR Conference Applications in 5G Radio Networks

One of the most challenging applications targeted by evolving (beyond-)5G technology is virtual reality (VR). Particularly, 'Social VR' applications provide a fully immersive experience and sense of togetherness to users residing at different locations. To support such applications the network must deal with huge traffic demands, while keeping...

System Modeling and Simulation in 5G: A Hybrid Beamforming Approach With Power Flux Equalization in the Elevation Plane

This paper presents a 5G downlink system model for a hybrid multi-user beamforming technique at the base station. The presented technique employs power flux equalization in the elevation plane using a fixed analog cosecant-shaped beam and digital beamforming in the azimuth plane. The system performances of various beamforming algorithms are...

Fast network congestion detection and avoidance using P4

Along with exciting visions for 5G communications and the Tactile Internet, the networking requirement of attaining extremely low end-to-end latency has appeared. While network devices are typically equipped with buffers to counteract packet loss caused by short-lived traffic bursts, the more those buffers get filled, the more delay is added to...

SDN and Virtualization Solutions for the Internet of Things: A Survey

The imminent arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), which consists of a vast number of devices with heterogeneous characteristics, means that future networks need a new architecture to accommodate the expected increase in data generation. Software defined networking (SDN) and network virtualization (NV) are two technologies that promise to...