NEC Laboratories America

Projects | 5G Cellular Networks

5G Cellular Networks

In developing technologies for deploying massive MIMO systems, we are exploiting the systems’ decorrelation property to avoid unnecessary pre-coder computations, thereby reducing scheduler overhead.

In our work with millimeter wave technologies, we are developing solutions using beam tracking technology that do not require explicit channel measurement. We are also creating a novel design framework for MU-MIMO scheduling in millimeter-wave networks that considers hybrid beamforming (analog plus digital precoding) at the transmitter and receiver nodes. We use transmit and receive analog precoding to reduce the CSI feedback overhead.

Dual connectivity (DC) is a feature that targets emerging practical HetNet deployments that will consist of non-ideal (higher latency) connections between transmission nodes. It has been recently introduced to the LTE-Advanced standard. DC allows for a user to be simultaneously served by a macro node as well as one other (typically micro or pico) node and requires coarser level coordination among serving nodes. For such a DC-enabled HetNet, we comprehensively analyze the problem of determining an optimal user association and then develop efficient solutions.

Publications

Roadside Multi-LiDAR Data Fusion for Enhanced Traffic Safety

Roadside LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors promise safer and faster traffic management and vehicular operations. However, occlusion and small view angles are significant challenges to widespread use of roadside LiDARs. We consider fusing data from multiple LiDARs at a traffic intersection to

Real-Time Network-Aware Roadside LiDAR Data Compression

LiDAR technology has emerged as a pivotal tool in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), providing unique capabilities that have significantly transformed roadside traffic applications. However, this transformation comes with a distinct challenge: the immense volume of data generated by LiDAR sensors.

AnB: Application-In-A-Box To Rapidly Deploy and Self-Optimize 5G Apps

We present Application in a Box (AnB) product concept aimed at simplifying the deployment and operation of remote 5G applications. AnB comes pre-configured with all necessary hardware and software components, including sensors like cameras, hardware and software components for a local 5G wireless network,

FactionFormer: Context-Driven Collaborative Vision Transformer Models for Edge Intelligence

Edge Intelligence has received attention in the recent times for its potential towards improving responsiveness, reducing the cost of data transmission, enhancing security and privacy, and enabling autonomous decisions by edge devices. However, edge devices lack the power and compute resources necessary

Efficient Compression Method for Roadside LiDAR Data

Roadside LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) sensors are recently being explored for intelligent transportation systems aiming at safer and faster traffic management and vehicular operations. A key challenge in such systems is to efficiently transfer massive point-cloud data from the roadside LiDAR devices

5GLoR: 5G LAN Orchestration for Enterprise IoT Applications

5G-LAN is an enterprise local area network (LAN) that leverages 5G technology for wireless connectivity instead of WiFi. 5G technology is unique: it uses network slicing to distinguish customers in the same traffic class using new QoS technologies in the RF domain. This unique ability is not supported

Application-specific, Dynamic Reservation of 5G Compute and Network Resources by using Reinforcement Learning

5G services and applications explicitly reserve compute and network resources in today’s complex and dynamic infrastructure of multi-tiered computing and cellular networking to ensure application-specific service quality metrics, and the infrastructure providers charge the 5G services for the resources

Chimera: Context-Aware Splittable Deep Multitasking Models for Edge Intelligence

Design of multitasking deep learning models has mostly focused on improving the accuracy of the constituent tasks, but the challenges of efficiently deploying such models in a device-edge collaborative setup (that is common in 5G deployments) has not been investigated. Towards this end, in this paper,

ROMA: Resource Orchestration for Microservices-based 5G Applications

With the growth of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing and cloud computing technologies, the infrastructure (compute and network) available to emerging applications (AR/VR, autonomous driving, industry 4.0, etc.) has become quite complex. There are multiple tiers of computing (IoT devices, near

Opportunistic Temporal Fair Mode Selection and User Scheduling in Full-Duplex Systems

In-band full-duplex (FD) communication has emerged as one of the promising techniques to improve data rates in next generation wireless systems. Typical FD scenarios considered in the literature assume FD base stations (BSs) and half-duplex (HD) users activated either in uplink (UL) or downlink (DL),

Employing Fiber Sensing and On-Premise AI Solutions for Cable Safety Protection over Telecom Infrastructure

We review the distributed-fiber-sensing field trial results over deployed telecom networks. With local AI processing, real-time detection, and localization of abnormal events with cable damage threat assessment are realized for cable self-protection.

Distributed Fiber Sensor Network Using Telecom Cables as Sensing Media: Technology Advancements and Applications

Distributed fiber optic sensing (DFOS) is a rapidly evolving field that allows the existing optical fiber infrastructure for telecommunications to be reused for wide-area sensing. Using the backscattering mechanisms of glass—which includes Rayleigh, Brillouin, and Raman backscatter—it is possible

Edge-based fever screening system over private 5G

Edge computing and 5G have made it possible to perform analytics closer to the source of data and achieve super-low latency response times, which isn’t possible with centralized cloud deployment. In this paper, we present a novel fever screening system, which uses edge machine learning techniques and

SmartSlice: Dynamic, Self-optimization of Application’s QoS requests to 5G networks

Applications can tailor a network slice by specifying a variety of QoS attributes related to application-specific performance, function or operation. However, some QoS attributes like guaranteed bandwidth required by the application do vary over time. For example, network bandwidth needs of video streams

AppSlice: A system for application-centric design of 5G and edge computing applications

Applications that use edge computing and 5G to improve response times consume both compute and network resources. However, 5G networks manage only network resources without considering the application’s compute requirements, and container orchestration frameworks manage only compute resources without

SkyHAUL: A Self-Organizing Gigabit Network In The Sky

We design and build SkyHaul, the first large-scale, self-organizing network of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that are connected using a mm Wave wireless mesh backhaul. While the use of a mmWave backhaul paves the way for a new class of bandwidth-intensive, latency-sensitive cooperative applications

Field Trial of Cable Safety Protection and Road Traffic Monitoring over Operational 5G Transport Network with Fiber Sensing and On-Premise AI Technologies

We report the distributed-fiber-sensing field trial results over a 5G-transport-network. A standard communication fiber is used with real-time AI processing for cable self-protection, cable-cut threat assessment and road traffic monitoring in a long-term continuous test.

Distributed Fiber Sensor Network using Telecom Cables as Sensing Media: Applications

Distributed fiber optical systems (DFOS) allow deployed optical cables to monitor the ambient environment over wide geographic area. We review recent field trial results, and show how DFOS can be made compatible with passive optical networks (PONs).

ECO: Edge-Cloud Optimization of 5G applications

Centralized cloud computing with 100+ milliseconds network latencies cannot meet the tens of milliseconds to sub-millisecond response times required for emerging 5G applications like autonomous driving, smart manufacturing, tactile internet, and augmented or virtual reality. We describe a new, dynamic

Simultaneous Optical Fiber Sensing and Mobile Front-Haul Access over a Passive Optical Network

We demonstrate a passive optical network (PON) that employs reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs) at optical network units (ONUs) to allow simultaneous data transmission with distributed fiber-optic sensing (DFOS) on individual distribution fibers.

SkyRAN: A Self-Organizing LTE RAN in the Sky

We envision a flexible, dynamic airborne LTE infrastructure built upon Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) that will provide on-demand, on-time, network access, anywhere. In this paper, we design, implement and evaluate SkyRAN, a self-organizing UAV-based LTE RAN (Radio Access Network) that is a key

SkyCore: Moving Core to the Edge for Untethered and Reliable UAV-based LTE Networks

The advances in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology have empowered mobile operators to deploy LTE base stations (BSs) on UAVs, and provide on-demand, adaptive connectivity to hotspot venues as well as emergency scenarios. However, today’s evolved packet core (EPC) that orchestrates the LTE RAN faces