Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access for Unicast and Multicast D2D: Channel Assignment, Power Allocation and Energy Efficiency.

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) techniques have emerged in the past years as a solution to approximate the throughput performance of wireless communications systems to their theoretical capacity region. We consider in this paper an optimization-based model for multicast device-to-device (MD2D) communications where the channels are not orthogonal and may be (partially or fully) shared among the transmitters in each cluster. This setting leads naturally to the introduction of NOMA transmitters and receivers who use successive interference cancellation (SIC) to separate the superposed signals. To analyze the role of NOMA in MD2D, its performance impact, potential performance gains and possible shortcomings, we formulate a model that includes SIC operations in the decoders, so that higher rates can be attained when several sources transmit on the same channel(s). We also investigate the energy efficiency of the network (global and max-min) through a dynamic power control algorithm and present a centralized and a semi-distributed solution to these optimization problems. Through numerical simulations, we show that NOMA is able to improve both the sum-rate and the max-min rate of a MD2D network even from a small degree of resource sharing. Furthermore, these gains also improve the global energy efficiency on the network, but not always the max-min energy efficiency of the devices.

Efficient Wind Speed Forecasting for Resource-Constrained Sensor Devices.

Wind energy harvesting technology is one of the most popular power sources for wireless sensor networks. However, given its irregular nature, wind energy availability experiences significant variations and, therefore, wind-powered devices need reliable forecasting models to effectively adjust their energy consumption to the dynamics of energy harvesting. On the other hand, resource-constrained devices with limited hardware capacities (such as sensor nodes) must resort to forecasting schemes of low complexity for their predictions in order to avoid squandering their scarce power and computing capabilities. In this paper, we present a new efficient ARIMA-based forecasting model for predicting wind speed at short-term horizons. The performance results obtained using real data sets show that the proposed ARIMA model can be an excellent choice for wind-powered sensor nodes due to its potential for achieving accurate enough predictions with very low computational burden and memory overhead. In addition, it is very simple to setup, since it can dynamically adapt to varying wind conditions and locations without requiring any particular reconfiguration or previous data training phase for each different scenario.

A Solar Altitude Angle Model for Efficient Solar Energy Predictions.

Sunlight is one of the most frequently used ambient energy sources for energy harvesting in wireless sensor networks. Although virtually unlimited, solar radiation experiences significant variations depending on the weather, the season, and the time of day, so solar-powered nodes commonly employ solar prediction models to effectively adapt their energy demands to harvesting dynamics. We present in this paper a novel energy prediction model that makes use of the altitude angle of the sun at different times of day to predict future solar energy availability. Unlike most of the state-of-the-art predictors that use past energy observations to make predictions, our model does not require one to maintain local energy harvesting patterns of past days. Performance evaluation shows that our scheme is able to provide accurate predictions for arbitrary forecasting horizons by performing just a few low complexity operations. Moreover, our proposal is extremely simple to set up since it does not require any particular tuning for each different scenario or location.

Matching SDN and Legacy Networking Hardware for Energy Efficiency and Bounded Delay.

Both economic and environmental costs are driving much research in the area of the energy efficiency of networking equipment. This research has produced a great amount of proposals. However, the majority of them remain unimplemented due to the lack of flexibility of current hardware devices and a certain lack of enthusiasm from commercial vendors. At the same time, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has allowed customers to control switching decisions with a flexibility and precision previously unheard of. This paper explores the potential convergence between the two aforementioned trends and presents a promising power saving algorithm that can be implemented using standard SDN capabilities of current switches, reducing operation costs on both data centers and wired access networks. In particular, we focus on minimizing the energy consumption in bundles of energy-efficient Ethernet links leveraging SDN. For this, we build on an existing theoretical algorithm and adapt it for implementing with an SDN solution. We study several approaches and compare the resulting algorithms not only according to their energy efficiency, but also taking into account additional QoS metrics. The results show that the resulting algorithm is able to closely match the theoretical results, even when taking into account the requirements of delay-sensitive traffic.