Tutorials offered at VTC2010-Spring

All tutorials will be held on Sunday 16 May 2010.

T1: Cooperative Wireless Communications
Presented by: Prof. Lajos Hanzo, University of Southampton, UK
Time: 8:30–12:00
Room: TBA

Abstract
This tutorial introduces the principles of cooperative communication, commencing with the introduction of four basic MIMO types, namely

1. Beamforming;

2. Space-time coding;

3. Spatial Division Myltiplexing;

4. Spatial Division Multiple Access;

Their limitations are highlighted and it is shown, how the single-antenna-aided cooperative mobile may circumvent these limitations.
The corresponding amplify-forward and decode-forward protocols as well as their hybrids are studied. Sophisticated multi-stage iterative channel coding schemes are proposed and it is argued that in the absence of accurate channel information at the relays the best way forward might be to use multiple-symbol differential detection. EXIT-chart-aided designs are used for creating near-capacity solutions and future research directions as well as open problems are stated.

Tutorial Objectives
In the early days of wireless communications the research community used to view multipath-induced dispersion as an undesirable propagation phenomenon, which could only be combatted with the aid of complex channel equalizers. The longer the Channel Impulse Response (CIR) was, the more complex the channel equalizer became. However, provided that the complexity of a sufficiently high-memory channel equalizer was affordable, the receiver could benefit from the fact that the individual propagation paths faded independently. To leaborate a little further, even if one of the paths was experiencing a high attenuation, there was a good chance that some of the other paths were not, which led to a potential diversity gain. However, if the channel does not exhibit several independently fading paths, techniques of artificially inducing diversity may have to be sought. A simple option is to employ a higher direct-sequence spreading factor, which results in a higher number of resolvable multipath components and hence in an increased diversity gain. Naturally, this is only possible if either the available bandwidth may be extended according to the spreading factor or the achievable bitrate is reduced by the same factor. A whole host of classic diversity combining techniques may be invoked then for recovering the original signal. An alternative technique of providing multiple independently faded replicas of the transmitted signal is to employ relaying, distributed space-time coding or some other cooperation-aided procedure, which is the subject of this course. One could also view the benefits of decode-and-forward based relaying as receiving and then flawlessly regenerating and re-transmitting the original transmitted signal from a relay - provided of course that the relay succeeded in error-freely detecting the original transmitted signal. This course reviews the current state-of-the-art and proposes a number of novel relaying and cooperation techniques. An important related issue is the availability or the absence accurate channel information, which leads to the concept of coherent versus non-coherent detection at the realys and at the destination. Similarly, the related initial synchronization issues also have to be considered. Naturally, when using hard-decisions in the transmission chain, we discard valuable soft-information, which results in an eroded performance, albeit also reduces the complexity imposed. Hence the hard- versus soft-decoding performance trade-off will also be explored in the course, along with the benefits of interleaved random space-time coding invoked for multi-source cooperation.

Tutorial Outline

History and Background

Cooperative Protocols: AF, DF, hybrids

Distributed Coding for Cooperation: Linear Dispersion Codes, Irregular Convolutional Codes and their Turbo-detection

Extensions: Multi-node and Multi-antenna Systems

Relay Selection and Resource Allocation for Cooperation

Multi-Source Cooperation Using Superposition Coding and Physical Layer Algebraic Network Coding

Coherent versus Non-coherent Detection Using Multiple-Symbol Differential Detection

The Effects of Shadow-Fading

Advanced Topics, Future Research Directions and Open Problems

Primary Audience
This light-hearted overview was prepared for colleagues from academia, industry, and government, including graduate students looking for open research problems. The level of treatment is mainly conceptual.

Novelty
This overview considers all practical aspects of cooperative communications, including coherent versus non-coherent detection, the prevention of error propagation owing to decode-and-forward errors, EXIT-chart-aided radically new irregular FEC schemes, asynchronous operation, etc.

Biography
Lajos Hanzo (http://www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk) FREng, FIEEE, FIET, DSc received his degree in electronics in 1976 and his doctorate in 1983. During his 34-year career in telecommunications he has held various research and academic posts in Hungary, Germany and the UK. Since 1986 he has been with the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton, UK, where he holds the chair in telecommunications. He has co-authored 19 books on mobile radio communications totaling in excess of 10 000, published 690 research papers ay IEEE Xplore, acted as TPC Chair of IEEE conferences, presented keynote lectures and been awarded a number of distinctions. Currently he is directing an academic research team, working on a range of research projects in the field of wireless multimedia communications sponsored by industry, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) UK, the European IST Programme and the Mobile Virtual Centre of Excellence (VCE), UK. He is an enthusiastic supporter of industrial and academic liaison and he offers a range of industrial courses. He is also an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer as well as a Governor of both the IEEE ComSoc and the VTS. He is the acting Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Press. For further information on research in progress and associated publications please refer to http://www-mobile.ecs.soton.ac.uk

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T2: Game Theory for Analysis and Optimization of Vehicular Networks
Presented by: Prof. Dusit Niyato, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Time: 8:30–12:00
Room: TBA

Abstract
Vehicular networks can be used to support various safety-related and non-safety-related intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications. Vehicular networks in the forms of vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications use advanced wireless technologies to transfer data to meet the demand and requirement of ITS applications. Since the entities (e.g., vehicular users) in vehicular networks have rational and self-interest behavior, they will maximize their own benefits which could conflict each other. Game theory provides a rich set of mathematical tools to model and analyze conflict situations of protocol optimization and radio resource management in vehicular networks. In this tutorial, an intensive (but friendly) introduction to the various game theory models, their fundamental concepts and properties, and their applications in analyzing and optimizing the performance of protocol and radio resource management in vehicular networks will be provided. At the beginning, brief introduction to ITS applications, the fundamental concepts and core technologies of vehicular networks, and the structure of V2I and V2V communications will be described. Game theory models for road traffic information exchange, bandwidth auction from roadside base station, competitive wireless access for data streaming, transmission rate control in vehicular delay tolerant network, bargaining between vehicles to exchange data chunks in peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, cluster formation and coalitional game model for bandwidth sharing will be presented. To this end, the summary of open research issues and directions will be discussed.

Tutorial Objectives
The objective of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive introduction to the game theory concepts with their applications in designing the protocol and radio resource management in vehicular networks. Game theory provides a very powerful mathematical framework for analyzing the interactions among different entities (e.g., vehicular users and network service providers) in vehicular networks based on vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. These entities can be rational and self-interested to maximize their own benefits (i.e,. payoffs) in a distributed ways. Different game theoretic tools to analyze and optimize the performance of vehicular networks based on V2I and V2V communications will be discussed with concrete examples.

With the rising cost of fuel and increasing number of vehicles on the road, various intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications have been introduced to improve the safety, efficiency, and pleasantness of road transportation. Vehicular network is the key technology to efficiently support ITS applications.

Therefore, vehicular network is currently of great interest to researchers and practitioners involved in the design, analysis, and optimization of next generation transportation system. This is potentially a very fertile area of research with many open problems related to radio resource management, protocol design, and implementation of vehicular networks. This tutorial will give a solid introduction to how to use the game theory models for design, analysis, and optimization of vehicular networks. Therefore, the tutorial would be very timely and is expected to attract a good crowd which includes

--Researchers and communication engineers interested in studying the design of protocol and radio resource management for vehicular networks.
--Researchers and communication engineers interested in integrating vehicular networks with ITS applications.
--Graduate students interested in protocol design and radio resource optimization for V2I and V2V communications in vehicular networks.

The prerequisite knowledge for the audience includes understanding of the basics of wireless communications and networking.

Tutorial Outline

1 Introduction to vehicular networks:
Overview of intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications
Overview of vehicular networks: Wireless technologies used in vehicular networks, vehicle-toinfrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications
Examples of conflict situations in vehicular networks due to rational and self-interest behavior of vehicular users

2 Basics of game theory:
Non-cooperative vs. cooperative, static (one-shot) vs. repeated (iterative) games
Pure strategy vs. mixed strategy, complete information vs. incomplete information, perfect information vs. imperfect information games
Games in strategic (normal) form and in extensive form
Solving games: Best response function and Nash equilibrium (NE)
Efficiency of NE: Pareto optimality, correlated equilibrium
Stochastic game
Bayesian game
Cooperative/bargaining/coalitional game
Stackelberg game, supermodular game, potential game

3 Application of game theory in vehicular networks:
Game model of self-interested vehicular users to pass true road traffic information
Game model of bandwidth auction mechanism among vehicular users
Stochastic game model of competitive wireless access for data streaming over V2I communication
Game model of transmission rate control in vehicular delay tolerant networks
Bargaining game model of P2P-based file sharing in vehicular networks
Hierarchical game model of cluster formation and bandwidth sharing in heterogeneous vehicular networks
Coalitional game model for efficient bandwidth sharing in vehicular networks

4 Open research issues and direction

5 Summary

6 References

Primary Audience
Researchers and communication engineers interested in studying the design of protocol and radio resource management for vehicular networks.

Researchers and communication engineers interested in integrating vehicular networks with ITS applications.

Graduate students interested in protocol design and radio resource optimization for V2I and V2V communications in vehicular networks.

Novelty
Applications of game theory to vehicular communication have not been explored before. However, many entities in vehicular networks can exhibit selfishness and rationality. Equilibrium solution is more practical for this competitive situation.

Biography
Dusit Niyato (M’08) is currently an assistant professor in the Division of Computer Communications, School of Computer Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
His current research interests include design, analysis, and optimization of wireless communication and vehicular networks for ITS applications. He is co-author of the books Dynamic Spectrum Access and Management in Cognitive Radio Networks (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Game Theory in Wireless and Communication Networks: Theory, Models, and Applications (Cambridge University Press 2011). He is author of the chapter 'Game-Theoretic Models for Vehicular Networks' in the edited book Game Theory for Wireless Communications and Networking (Auerbach Publications, CRC Press). He has published more than 80 papers in leading Journal and Conferences related to protocol design and radio resource management in mobile communication systems. Dr. Dusit serves as an Editor for the Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (WCMC) and Journal of Communications and Networks (JCN). He is a co-chair of Next Generation Mobile Networks Symposium, International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing Conference (IWCMC) 2009 and 2010.

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T3: Energy Efficient Networks
Presented by: Dr. Oliver Blume, Alcatel-Lucent Germany and Dr. Kostas Pentikousis, Huawei Technologies ERC, Berlin
Time: 13:30–17:00
Room: TBA

Abstract
Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contribute an increasing share to global energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. Previous efforts to improve energy efficiency focused on different network architecture components, aiming in particular at increasing the operational time of battery-powered devices. Today, however, industry and academia are taking a more holistic approach. Green ICT has emerged as an important area in research, development, and deployment of telecommunication networks. This tutorial introduces the latest data on ICT energy consumption and highlights the trends in the corresponding research efforts to reduce it. We will focus on the latest developments in mobile computing and networks, wireless communications, and content distribution and service delivery.

Tutorial Objectives
Energy Efficiency (EE) and GreenICT are megatrends today: Network operators mandate EE in their RFQs and the ITU-T declares that all standardisation has to be judged for EE. Research frameworks like the European Community FP7 take sustainability and energy efficiency into the focus of funded projects to mitigate climate change effects and energy consumption. Many major conferences now add sessions on energy efficiency and a growing number of dedicated papers on energy efficient networking are appearing.

This tutorial will provide conference attendants with the opportunity to take part in this effort. We will give a wrap up of the background and state-of-the-art to enable tutorial attendees to enter the detailed discussion of related papers in the conference sessions, to cross-link with other interested people and to get companies and academia together to discus new project opportunities.

The objective is to gain an overview which parts of the network are most relevant for the energy consumption and which parts are critical with respect to the strong growth of data traffic rates. This will identify the most important areas of research and the areas of highest impact. These areas include wireless base stations, network management and RF components, and also fixed access and server farm cooling.

We will also review the evolution from simple cell phones toward the feature-rich mobile networked devices we have come to expect from manufacturers, and explain the factors that have led to stagnation in operational time. We then turn our attention to the multiaccess nature of modern mobile devices and the respective implications for power management. We find that the current host-centric mobile networking paradigm, based on end-to-end always on connectivity, leads to energy-inefficient operation. We will introduce information-centric networking and outlines open research issues in the design of energy-efficient future Internet architectures.

Finally the tutorial will present methods and technologies of "Cloud Computing" as an inherently energy-efficient ICT alternative and discuss its operational and networking aspects of energy consumption.

Tutorial Outline

Introduction
Climate change and greenhouse gas emissions as megatrends
ICT energy consumption estimates: servers, devices, core networks, access networks, wired/wireless
Operator and user point of view
Current R&D initiatives

Network and Server Energy Consumption
Transport and routing (the impact of algorithms, recent developments, throughput and performance considerations)
FTTC and FTTH impact on energy consumption
Server farms: service and storage delivery
Innovative server farm architectures; cooling solutions; energy harvesting and renewable energy sources
Tradeoffs

Mobile Computing and Networking
Device constraints
Features explosion; battery capacity stagnation; operational time stagnation
Multiaccess power management; IEEE 802.21 and other proposals

Wireless Communications
Last mile radio transmissions
Base station energy consumption (3G/HSPA/LTE, WiMAX, Wi-Fi)
Throughput vs. energy consumption tradeoffs and design choices
PA design; remote radio heads; passive cooling
Heterogeneous RANs and femtocells
Dynamic network management, interference coordination, and cooperative base stations

Information-centric Networking and Cloud Computing
Towards a new Future Internet architecture/paradigm: a Network of Information and the 4WARD approach
Information-centric service delivery
Computation/Communication/Storage tradeoffs in NetInf and beyond
Cloud computing as an inherently energy-efficient ICT alternative
Operational and networking aspects of energy consumption in cloud computing
Methods and technologies for energy-efficient cloud computing infrastructures

Primary Audience
We are addressing engineers and managers from the ICT community that want to enter the field of Energy Efficient (EE) Networks, with a focus on wireless networks and computing. We will introduce them into the socio-economic background, the state-of-the-art, most relevant approaches and current research topics and related projects (FP7).

Novelty
The tutorial is a first of its kind in this aim. With the background from both academia and industry research, the presenters will give a unique introduction into the hot topic of energy efficiency. The two presenters are involved in two of the most relevant research projects in Europe, and they will not only cover the state-of-the-art but also the latest approaches and ongoing research efforts.

Biography
Oliver Blume is working at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs in Stuttgart (formerly Alcatel Research & Innovation) as Senior Research Engineer in the Radio System Optimization department. He studied physics at the University of Hamburg (1990) and holds a Dr.-Ing. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg (2000). Oliver has been working in the area of Integrated Optics, optical communication and wireless communication. His current research interests are in multi-radio resource management and in energy efficiency of radio communication systems. Oliver has participated in several EU and national research projects, like Ambient Networks, and ScaleNet. Currently he is involved in the EU-FP7 project EARTH on Energy Efficiency, with manufacturers, operators and leading academia under the consortium lead of Alcatel-Lucent. He has published numerous papers both from Bell-Labs and from cooperative projects and is member of the Alcatel-Lucent Technical Academy (ALTA).

Kostas Pentikousis is a Senior Research Engineer at Huawei Technologies European Research Center in Berlin, Germany. He studied computer science at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (B.Sc. 1996) and the State University of New York at Stony Brook (M.Sc. 2000, Ph.D. 2004). He has been involved in several contract and joint research projects, including the EU-funded Ambient Networks, PHOENIX, WEIRD, and 4WARD, and the Future Internet program of the Finnish Strategic Centre for Science, Technology and Innovation in the field of ICT (TIVIT). Dr. Pentikousis has published more than seventy academic papers and book chapters in areas such as network architecture and design, mobile computing, applications and services, local and wide-area networks, and energy efficient networking. He presented several tutorials on these topics, most recently at the Future Internet Summer School (FISS) at the University of Bremen and the Sixth IEEE International Symposium on Wireless Communication Systems (ISWCS). He is currently working on information-centric networking concepts and systems and is particularly interested in energy-efficient future Internet architectures designed for mobility and multiaccess.

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T4: Inter-Vehicular Communications: Protocols and Simulation Techniques
Presented by: Prof. Falko Dressler, University of Erlangen, Germany
Time: 13:30–17:00
Room: TBA

Abstract
Much progress can be observed in the domain of Inter-Vehicular Communication, looking back at the last decade. It can be seen that studies of IVC protocols in the context of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are typically based on simulation models. This approach has two major prerequisites: First, detailed network simulation of all layers of communication protocols is necessary as provided by a wide variety of tools by the networking community. Secondly, realistic simulation of vehicles’ mobility, i.e., an exact modeling of road traffic, is needed to estimate positions and movements of involved components. The objectives of this tutorial are twofold: In the first part, an introduction to recent developments in the field of IVC protocols and the used methods is provides. In the second part, we investigate the evolution of mobility modeling in VANET simulations and how recent advances in bidirectional coupling of road traffic microsimulation and network simulation lead to more realistic results at comparably low computational cost. The tutorial aims to provide insights into relevant methods and protocols in the IVC domain and on how adequate performance studies have to be conducted.

Tutorial Objectives
In a first introductory section, we discuss the need for IVC solutions in different application scenarios. We investigate the requirements ranging from traffic information systems to safety applications with real-time communication constraints. Typical IVC approaches are introduced including VANETs, infrastructure-based, and centralized 3/4G solutions.

The aim of second part is to provide detailed information on which communication methods can be applied and how IVC protocols are developed. We study ad hoc routing approaches and their limitations to cover wide areas and the routing overhead in urban scenarios as well as recent geographical routing and gossip-based data dissemination techniques. The main focus, however, will be on recently developed beaconing approaches and store-carry-forward solutions known from delay-tolerant networking.

Because practical experiments are often not feasible, simulation of IVC protocol behavior is strongly demanded for evaluating the applicability of developed network protocols. In this sec-tion, we discuss the need for bidirectional coupling of network simulation and road traffic micro-simulation for evaluating IVC protocols. As the selection of a mobility model influences the out-come of simulations to a great deal, the use of a representative model is necessary for producing meaningful evaluation results. Based on these observations, we study hybrid simulation composed of network simulation tools such as ns-2 or OMNeT++ and the road traffic simulator SUMO. Based on selected examples, we demonstrate its advantages and the need for bidirectionally coupled simulation. Using these simulation techniques, performance evaluation of IVC protocols becomes more accurate compared to real-world scenarios.

The research on IVC methods and protocols has not yet converged. Based on current IVC ap-proaches, two trends can be identified for future TIS solutions: peer-to-peer like information management and beaconing techniques. Both are highly distributed and delay-tolerant, but are targeting two different application domains. Peer-to-peer solutions are highly applicable for ex-tremely delay-tolerant applications. On the other hand, beaconing systems are better suited for TIS data exchange with support for delay-sensitive safety applications. Further investigations are also needed in the field of simulation techniques. For example, the influence of the driver beha-vior on the technical solutions is still an open issue.

Tutorial Outline

1 Introduction to Inter-Vehicular Communication
2 Methods and Protocols
3 Performance evaluation
4 Conclusions and Future Research

Primary Audience
The tutorial is targeting researchers in the field of inter-vehicular communication both from acade-mia and industry. The goal is to introduce the current state-of-the-art of inter-vehicular communication protocols, especially focusing on applications related to intelligent transportation and traffic information systems. Main emphasis will be on protocol evaluation based on simulation experiments. Attendees who are new to the field will thus be presented a survey on approaches to IVC and their main benefits and weaknesses. People who already actively working in the field will benefit from intensive discussions on mobility models and simulation control.

Novelty
The major objective is to provide insights into the field of protocol engineering and simulation-based performance evaluation in the field of vehicular communication. Frequently, the choice of mobility models or simulation parameters and tools is leading to ambiguous results. We want to share our experience in both fields vehicular communication protocols and simulation techniques.

Biography
Falko Dressler is an assistant professor leading the Autonomic Networking Group at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen. He teaches on self-organizing sensor and actor networks, network security, and communication systems. Dr. Dressler received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degree from the Dept. of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen in 1998 and 2003, respectively. In 2003, he joined the Computer Networks and Internet group at the Wilhelm-Schickard-Institute for Computer Science, University of Tuebingen. Since 2004, he is with the Computer Networks and Communication Systems group at the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Erlangen.
Dr. Dressler is an Editor for journals such as Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks and ACM/Springer Wireless Networks (WINET). He was guest editor of special issues on self-organization, autonomic networking, and bio-inspired computing and communication for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), Elsevier Ad Hoc Networks, and Springer Transactions on Computational Systems Biology (TCSB). Besides chairing a number of workshops associated to high-level conferences, he regularly acts in the TPC of leading networking conferences such as IEEE INFOCOM, IEEE ICC, IEEE Globecom, IEEE MASS, IFIP Networking and others. Dr. Dressler published two books including Self-Organization in Sensor and Actor Networks, published by Wiley in 2007.
Dr. Dressler is Senior Member of the IEEE (Communications Society, Computer Society, Vehicular Technology Society), member of ACM (SIGMOBILE) and GI (KuVS, Real-time). He is actively participating in several working groups of the IETF. His research activities are focused on self-organizing networks addressing issues in wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, inter-vehicular communication systems, bio-inspired networking, and adaptive network security techniques.

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