Medium Access Control and Routing Protocols Design for 5G

In future wireless systems, such as 5G and beyond, the current dominating human-centric communication systems will be complemented by a tremendous increase in the number of smart devices, equipped with radio devices, possibly sensors, and uniquely addressable. This will result in explosion of wireless traffic volume, and consequently exponential growth in demand of radio spectrum. There are different engineering techniques for resolving the cost and scarcity of radio spectrum such as coexistence of diverse devices on the same pool of radio resources, spectrum aggregations, adoption of mmWave bands with huge spectrum, etc. The aim of this thesis is to investigate Medium Access Control (MAC) and routing protocols for 5G and beyond radio networks. Two scenarios are addressed: heterogeneous scenario where scheduled and uncoordinated users coexist, and a scenario where drones are used for monitoring a given area. In the heterogeneous scenario scheduled users are synchronised with the Base Station (BS) and rely on centralised resource scheduler for assignment of time slots, while the uncoordinated users are asynchronous with each other and the BS and rely unslotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) for channel access. First, we address a single-hop network with advanced scheduling algorithm design and packet length adaptation schemes design. Second, we address a multi-hop network with novel routing protocol for enhancing performance of the scheduled users in terms of throughput, and coexistence of all network users. In the drone-based scenario, new routing protocols are designed to address the problems of Wireless Mesh Networks with monitoring drones. In particular, a novel optimised Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (O-HWMP) for a quick and efficient discovery of paths is designed, and a capacity achieving routing and scheduling algorithm, called backpressure, investigated. To improve on the long-end-to-end delays of classical backpressure, a modified backpressure algorithm is proposed and evaluated.