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Habilitation Thesis

Defense

My habilitation thesis (Habilitation à diriger des recherches) is entitled "Optimizing Resource Allocation in Cellular Wireless Networks".

The defense took place on Friday, February 24 at 10:00AM at Université Paris-Saclay. The jury was composed of:

  • Professor Young-June Choi, Graduate School of AI, Department of Software and Computer Engineering, Ajou University, Korea [Reviewer]
  • Professor Oriol Sallent, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain [Reviewer]
  • Professor Salah Eddine Ayoubi, CentraleSupélec, Laboratoire Signaux et Systèmes, France [Reviewer]
  • Professor Sanaa Sharafeddine, Department of Computer Science, American University of Beirut, Lebanon
  • Professor André-Luc Beylot, Telecommunication and Network Department, ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France
  • Professor Stefano Secci, CNAM Paris, France
  • Professor Dominique Quadri, Université Paris-Saclay, France

Summary of the Work

In this presentation, I will discuss how our research works contribute to advancing the state of the art in the radio resource management of cellular wireless networks. I will present original models, algorithms, and performance evaluations that tackle major challenges in our field. Our works aim to narrow the gap between what is expected from wireless technologies and what they provide in real-world scenarios.

The first challenge is related to spectral and energy efficiency. I will present our works on full-duplex communications. With the help of our scheduling and power allocation algorithms, full-duplex communications almost double the throughput for the users and cut the waiting delay to half.

The second challenge is related to the heterogeneity and densification of deployment. I will tackle the problem of spectrum allocation and user association in heterogeneous networks consisting of macro cells and small cells deployment with both mmWave and traditional sub-6GHz technology. Through our work, we offer valuable guidelines into HetNet design. Our devised framework yields load-aware resource management that prevents over-dimensioning radio resources, or defectively associating users to crowded cells.

The third challenge is related to massive connectivity. I will focus on LoRaWAN wireless access for the internet of things. I will start by introducing a new path loss model for LoRaWAN based on extensive measurement campaigns. Then, I will present our works on increasing the scalability of LoRaWAN. Particularly, our optimization algorithms compute the distribution of nodes over spreading factors in a way to mitigate the impact of collisions. Our contributions are tailored for dense deployments of gateways in the case of a single or multiple operators.

I will end my presentation by showing how the aforementioned challenges help in analyzing the future evolution of cellular wireless networks and shed the light on some promising perspectives.

Available Resources