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Roy D. Yates

Publications and source records attributed to Roy D. Yates.

46 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

The Age of Information: Real-Time Status Updating by Multiple Sources

We examine multiple independent sources providing status updates to a monitor through simple queues. We formulate an Age of Information (AoI) timeliness metric and derive a general result for the AoI that is applicable to a wide variety of multiple source service systems. For first-come first-served and two types of last-come first-served systems with Poisson arrivals and exponential service times, we find the region of feasible average status ages for multiple updating sources. We then use these results to characterize how a service facility can be shared among multiple updating sources. A new simplified technique for evaluating the AoI in finite-state continuous-time queueing systems is also derived. Based on stochastic hybrid systems, this method makes AoI evaluation to be comparable in complexity to finding the stationary distribution of a finite-state Markov chain.

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Status Updates Over Unreliable Multiaccess Channels

Applications like environmental sensing, and health and activity sensing, are supported by networks of devices (nodes) that send periodic packet transmissions over the wireless channel to a sink node. We look at simple abstractions that capture the following commonalities of such networks (a) the nodes send periodically sensed information that is temporal and must be delivered in a timely manner, (b) they share a multiple access channel and (c) channels between the nodes and the sink are unreliable (packets may be received in error) and differ in quality. We consider scheduled access and slotted ALOHA-like random access. Under scheduled access, nodes take turns and get feedback on whether a transmitted packet was received successfully by the sink. During its turn, a node may transmit more than once to counter channel uncertainty. For slotted ALOHA-like access, each node attempts transmission in every slot with a certain probability. For these access mechanisms we derive the age of information (AoI), which is a timeliness metric, and arrive at conditions that optimize AoI at the sink. We also analyze the case of symmetric updating, in which updates from different nodes must have the same AoI. We show that ALOHA-like access, while simple, leads to AoI that is worse by a factor of about 2e, in comparison to scheduled access.

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Status updates through M/G/1/1 queues with HARQ

We consider a system where randomly generated updates are to be transmitted to a monitor, but only a single update can be in the transmission service at a time. Therefore, the source has to prioritize between the two possible transmission policies: preempting the current update or discarding the new one. We consider Poisson arrivals and general service time, and refer to this system as the M/G/1/1 queue. We start by studying the average status update age and the optimal update arrival rate for these two schemes under general service time distribution. We then apply these results on two practical scenarios in which updates are sent through an erasure channel using (a) an infinite incremental redundancy (IIR) HARQ system and (b) a fixed redundancy (FR) HARQ system. We show that in both schemes the best strategy would be not to preempt. Moreover, we also prove that, from an age point of view, IIR is better than FR.

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Update or Wait: How to Keep Your Data Fresh

In this work, we study how to optimally manage the freshness of information updates sent from a source node to a destination via a channel. A proper metric for data freshness at the destination is the age-of-information, or simply age, which is defined as how old the freshest received update is since the moment that this update was generated at the source node (e.g., a sensor). A reasonable update policy is the zero-wait policy, i.e., the source node submits a fresh update once the previous update is delivered and the channel becomes free, which achieves the maximum throughput and the minimum delay. Surprisingly, this zero-wait policy does not always minimize the age. This counter-intuitive phenomenon motivates us to study how to optimally control information updates to keep the data fresh and to understand when the zero-wait policy is optimal. We introduce a general age penalty function to characterize the level of dissatisfaction on data staleness and formulate the average age penalty minimization problem as a constrained semi-Markov decision problem (SMDP) with an uncountable state space. We develop efficient algorithms to find the optimal update policy among all causal policies, and establish sufficient and necessary conditions for the optimality of the zero-wait policy. Our investigation shows that the zero-wait policy is far from the optimum if (i) the age penalty function grows quickly with respect to the age, (ii) the packet transmission times over the channel are positively correlated over time, or (iii) the packet transmission times are highly random (e.g., following a heavy-tail distribution).

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Uplink Linear Receivers for Multi-cell Multiuser MIMO with Pilot Contamination: Large System Analysis

Base stations with a large number of transmit antennas have the potential to serve a large number of users at high rates. However, the receiver processing in the uplink relies on channel estimates which are known to suffer from pilot interference. In this work, making use of the similarity of the uplink received signal in CDMA with that of a multi-cell multi-antenna system, we perform a large system analysis when the receiver employs an MMSE filter with a pilot contaminated estimate. We assume a Rayleigh fading channel with different received powers from users. We find the asymptotic Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) as the number of antennas and number of users per base station grow large while maintaining a fixed ratio. Through the SINR expression we explore the scenario where the number of users being served are comparable to the number of antennas at the base station. The SINR explicitly captures the effect of pilot contamination and is found to be the same as that employing a matched filter with a pilot contaminated estimate. We also find the exact expression for the interference suppression obtained using an MMSE filter which is an important factor when there are significant number of users in the system as compared to the number of antennas. In a typical set up, in terms of the five percentile SINR, the MMSE filter is shown to provide significant gains over matched filtering and is within 5 dB of MMSE filter with perfect channel estimate. Simulation results for achievable rates are close to large system limits for even a 10-antenna base station with 3 or more users per cell.

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Bits Through Bufferless Queues

This paper investigates the capacity of a channel in which information is conveyed by the timing of consecutive packets passing through a queue with independent and identically distributed service times. Such timing channels are commonly studied under the assumption of a work-conserving queue. In contrast, this paper studies the case of a bufferless queue that drops arriving packets while a packet is in service. Under this bufferless model, the paper provides upper bounds on the capacity of timing channels and establishes achievable rates for the case of bufferless M/M/1 and M/G/1 queues. In particular, it is shown that a bufferless M/M/1 queue at worst suffers less than 10% reduction in capacity when compared to an M/M/1 work-conserving queue.

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Cellular Systems with Many Antennas: Large System Analysis under Pilot Contamination

Base stations with a large number of transmit antennas have the potential to serve a large number of users simultaneously at higher rates. They also promise a lower power consumption due to coherent combining at the receiver. However, the receiver processing in the uplink relies on the channel estimates which are known to suffer from pilot interference. In this work, we perform an uplink large system analysis of multi-cell multi-antenna system when the receiver employs a matched filtering with a pilot contaminated estimate. We find the asymptotic Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio (SINR) as the number of antennas and number of users per base station grow large while maintaining a fixed ratio. To do this, we make use of the similarity of the uplink received signal in a multi-antenna system to the representation of the received signal in CDMA systems. The asymptotic SINR expression explicitly captures the effect of pilot contamination and that of interference averaging. This also explains the SINR performance of receiver processing schemes at different regimes such as instances when the number of antennas are comparable to number of users as well as when antennas exceed greatly the number of users. Finally, we also propose that the adaptive MMSE symbol detection scheme, which does not require the explicit channel knowledge, can be employed for cellular systems with large number of antennas.

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Interference Alignment for Line-of-Sight Channels

The fully connected K-user interference channel is studied in a multipath environment with bandwidth W. We show that when each link consists of D physical paths, the total spectral efficiency can grow {\it linearly} with K. This result holds not merely in the limit of large transmit power P, but for any fixed P, and is therefore a stronger characterization than degrees of freedom. It is achieved via a form of interference alignment in the time domain. A caveat of this result is that W must grow with K, a phenomenon we refer to as {\it bandwidth scaling}. Our insight comes from examining channels with single path links (D=1), which we refer to as line-of-sight (LOS) links. For such channels we build a time-indexed interference graph and associate the communication problem with finding its maximal independent set. This graph has a stationarity property that we exploit to solve the problem efficiently via dynamic programming. Additionally, the interference graph enables us to demonstrate the necessity of bandwidth scaling for any scheme operating over LOS interference channels. Bandwidth scaling is then shown to also be a necessary ingredient for interference alignment in the K-user interference channel.

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Discrete Memoryless Interference and Broadcast Channels with Confidential Messages: Secrecy Rate Regions

We study information-theoretic security for discrete memoryless interference and broadcast channels with independent confidential messages sent to two receivers. Confidential messages are transmitted to their respective receivers with information-theoretic secrecy. That is, each receiver is kept in total ignorance with respect to the message intended for the other receiver. The secrecy level is measured by the equivocation rate at the eavesdropping receiver. In this paper, we present inner and outer bounds on secrecy capacity regions for these two communication systems. The derived outer bounds have an identical mutual information expression that applies to both channel models. The difference is in the input distributions over which the expression is optimized. The inner bound rate regions are achieved by random binning techniques. For the broadcast channel, a double-binning coding scheme allows for both joint encoding and preserving of confidentiality. Furthermore, we show that, for a special case of the interference channel, referred to as the switch channel, the two bound bounds meet. Finally, we describe several transmission schemes for Gaussian interference channels and derive their achievable rate regions while ensuring mutual information-theoretic secrecy. An encoding scheme in which transmitters dedicate some of their power to create artificial noise is proposed and shown to outperform both time-sharing and simple multiplexed transmission of the confidential messages.

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The Discrete Memoryless Multiple Access Channel with Confidential Messages

A multiple-access channel is considered in which messages from one encoder are confidential. Confidential messages are to be transmitted with perfect secrecy, as measured by equivocation at the other encoder. The upper bounds and the achievable rates for this communication situation are determined.

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