Device-Centric Cooperation in Wireless Networks

Abstract

Conventional cellular architectures have long promoted a network-centric view, whereby communication with a user device is almost always placed under the tight control of an element of the infrastructure such as a base station and where the optimization of global spectral resources is managed centrally from the network itself. This situation is changing with the new opportunities offered by direct device communications in 5G and beyond.

When suitably exploited, direct communications between devices can enable a powerful collective intelligence among user terminals, allowing them to cooperate effectively in view of improving the link quality, the spectral density or the power efficiency. Because device cooperation is carried out on the basis of partial and noisy channel state measurements, a framework for robust decentralized decision making is essential. This problem is rooted in so-called coordination and team decision theories, which have GAINED IMPORTANCE LATELY and attracted interest from industrial and academics due to wide-reaching applications, even beyond telecoms.

This tutorial is dedicated to device-centric cooperation and their application in 5G and beyond. As an introduction, we will introduce some key challenges of wireless communication and show how fundamental limitations of wireless networks can be addressed via DEVICE-CENTRIC COOPERATION.
This includes wide ranging issues such as interference management, MIMO feedback design, Massive MIMO coordination.

As a second part of the tutorial we will give an introduction to the general fields of COORDINATION AND TEAM DECISION THEORIES. We will present an overview of the different approaches, their main principles, advantages and limitations. This section provides the fundamental tools used in the rest of the tutorial, showcased in a didactic manner. Importantly, coordination and team decision theories are transversal topics which are useful to other fields as well (such as artificial intelligence, control and robotics). This cross-disciplinarily will be briefly touched upon.

In the third part, we review practical applications of DEVICE-CENTRIC COOPERATION to the problem of wireless network optimization and we show how this new way of looking at the problems can provide STRONG IMPROVEMENT and NEW INSIGHTS. Considering the most common and practically relevant scenarios (including resource allocation problems such as power control, scheduling, and beamforming), we show how RECENT PROGRESSES in the understanding of device-centric cooperation have permitted to overcome the obstacles initially formulated.