An unprecedented communication paradigm, facilitating a vast gamut of applications by connecting a prior unseen number of devices, is currently gripping both industrial as well as academic communities. Referred to as machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, it finds unprecedented applications in Smart Grids, Automated Metering Systems, Intelligent Transportation Systems, Smart Cities and many more. M2M facilitates communication without human intervention and is essentially composed of three key ingredients: 1) an end-device, 2) an infrastructure-based or infrastructure-less wireless carrier network, and 3) the back-end server network. M2M systems bear very specific and unparalleled challenges in both research and development. Prime design drivers here are the need for virtually zero-outage, immediate-response and high-efficiency to support reliable, green, long-living and delay-constrained M2M applications. With no clear winner established so far, two orthogonal approaches have thus commenced to contend for the M2M market, i.e. 1) cellular solutions relying on wide coverage; and 2) purely embedded solutions relying on cheap deployments.

The prime objective of this tutorial is therefore to acquaint an academic and industrial audience with crucial design approaches and architectural elements to facilitate a viable and efficient deployment of said networks. To this end, the tutorial is structured in the four parts. In the first part, we will discuss the cradle and reason of emergence of M2M systems and why market research got it all wrong. We will also discuss the peculiarities of these systems as well as their commercial importance in Smart Grids and Smart Cities. In the second part, we will elaborate on cellular M2M architectures evolving around 2G-4G systems and discuss the appropriateness of their PHY, MAC and architectural elements. We will pay particular attention to the prime challenges, i.e. the support of a huge amount of nodes at low complexity, requiring mainly uplink traffic of medium bandwidth but hard delay, and without disturbing current cellular applications. We will also give an exhaustive picture on standardization initiatives, namely ETSI TC M2M and 3GPP LTE-A MTC. In the third part, we will deal with embedded M2M systems which generally deliver traffic via multiple hops towards a gateway which in turn is connected to the back-end server network. From the vast gamut of available protocols, we will focus on emerging to-be-standardized IEEE 802.15.4e MAC and IETF 6LoWPAN/ROLL networking protocols. We will emphasize on how these meet the stringent delay and energy-efficiency requirements. In the fourth part, we draw a comparison between these canonical architectures and discuss various pertinent trade-offs. We will also summarize and highlight a large set of open problems which are likely to occupy the community for years to come.

UWB potentially fertilizes an enormous economic development, combining innovative radio technology with advanced methods such as cognitive radio (CR), location and tracking (LT) and multiple input multiple output (MIMO) antenna concepts, also, introducing advanced applications. In this tutorial, recent UWB advances are illustrated, setting out from the EUWB project (www.euwb.eu) and the results from the WALTER project (www.walter-uwb.eu) . Besides CR and detect and avoid (DAA) schemes, cooperative relay networking, combining MIMO with network coding, and LT schemes are considered. Furthermore, IEEE 802.15.4a low data rate (LDR) and ECMA-368/369 high data rate (HDR) platforms are illustrated. Finally, application environments are discussed and regulation and standardization are highlighted.

Future wireless communication systems deployment, including fourth generation (4G) cellular systems, wireless sensor networks, fixed broadband communications (WiMax), to name a few, will be based on the emerging technology of cooperative communications. The notion here is that the nodes comprising the network (referred to as relay nodes) will cooperate among themselves in transmitting data from a source to a destination, resulting in a virtual multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. This technology has significant advantages over conventional ones, including configuration flexibility, better coverage, higher capacity, improved performance, to name a few. This tutorial gives a complete overview of the various emerging coding techniques for cooperative communication networks. These include distributed space-time coding, distributed concatenated coding and iterative decoding, combined network coding and channel coding, among others. The tutorial focuses on the construction and performance analysis of such coding schemes over various wireless channels. In addition, it addresses information theoretical limits for various configurations of cooperative wireless networks. Participants will also see comparisons between these coding schemes in terms of performance and complexity. Furthermore, various relaying strategies will be addressed. Practical issues such as antenna and relay selection and the effects of sub-channel correlation and channel estimation error on the system performance will also be considered.

Dynamic and evolving networks, characterized by loose structure have become rather popular nowadays as their applications in different societal and research fields become more frequent. TACENet will focus on the relations and analogies between wireless communications and online social networks, and their impact on the design of contemporary indoor and outdoor networking infrastructures. The tutorial will cover the theory of complex networks and an overview of the fundamental research tools required for analyzing communications and social networks. To complete the current trends, applications and example networks will be presented, demonstrating the applicability of the previously presented analytical methods. The ultimate goal will be to provide the audience the necessary mathematical background and an illuminating applications overview, in order to stimulate further initiatives in the research community.

The next major development in wireless market will be the introduction of 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard. LTE has been designed to meet the increasing demands for high-speed data and multimedia transmission along with high-capacity voice support. With rather a dramatic departure from the existing CDMA-based 3G (third generation) wireless cellular systems, LTE air interface adopts OFDMA (orthogonal frequency division multiple access) for the downlink and SC-FDMA (single-carrier frequency domain multiple access) for the uplink. It employs AMC (adaptive modulation and coding) as well as a number of optional MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) antenna techniques and interference management methods for potential performance enhancements. This tutorial will cover major aspects of the LTE air interface providing details on the physical and data link layers. It will provide a comprehensive overview of OFDMA, SC-FDMA, AMC, and MIMO techniques as defined in 3GPP specifications and present justifications for the choice of such technologies. The tutorial will further present the principles of “relay-assisted (cooperative) communications” and “cognitive radio” which are envisioned for adoption in LTE Advanced standard.

Many researcher, students, and practicing engineers are familiar with iterative, turbo-style processing but still often lack the knowledge of the underlying mathematical framework. In this tutorial, we will provide a rigorous, yet accessible introduction to the framework of factor graphs and how it can be applied in developing iterative algorithms for estimation and detection. We emphasize the use of the factor graphs for the design of iterative receivers, with applications in decoding (e.g., turbo and LDPC codes), MIMO detection, multi-user detection, and synchronization. This tutorial is highly interactive with many examples and exercises. The objectives of this tutorial are to: (i) understand optimal detection; (ii) understand factor graphs and message passing, and their application to optimal detection; (iii) understand that many algorithms for detection and estimation can be seen as special of message passing on an appropriate factor graph; (iv) become familiar with the practical implementation of message passing algorithms; (v) be able to create factor graphs for new problems, and extend the knowledge from this tutorial to other problems beyond receiver design.

In theory, cooperative relaying systems show superior performance under idealistic assumptions on fading, coding, combining, channel knowledge, and protocol operation. In realistic scenarios, however, this high performance is not obvious. This tutorial bridges the gap between analyzing and prototyping cooperative relaying protocols. Based on recent advances in information theoretical models and metrics, we will discuss how closely analytically predicted gains are actually achieved by current prototypes. In particular, we will (1) introduce theoretical tools to assess the performance of ideal cooperative networks even under realistic constraints, (2) identify critical system functions that have a large effect on cooperative gains, and (3) describe how these functions can be implemented such that the benefit of cooperation is maintained even in realistic scenarios. Finally, we provide an extensive survey on current testbeds for cooperative networks. We describe several prototypes from industry and academics in detail and study how closely the presented theoretical methods capture the measured performance results. To our audience, this tutorial not only provides the theoretical background and tools to critically assess the real-life performance of upcoming cooperative networks but also an overview on the starting points and on the open issues to implement these.

This Tutorial offers a comprehensive view of technological and theoretical aspects of localization algorithms in connection with wireless communication networks. We start under the motivation of recent trends in wireless communications which point to an increasingly important role of location information both as the key parameter for new applications (such as personal navigation) and as a universal token of cognitivity which can be exploited to optimize wireless communication systems. After a brief categorization the localization problem according to the two major mathematical formulation paradigms, we discuss in concrete strategies to apply location information to the advantage of efficient communications, as well as analytical tools utilized to quantify the corresponding benefits and costs. Amongst other topics, the utilization of stochastic geometric tools in network models, novel results on the statistics of multihop distances, auctiontheoretic location-aware relay selection mechanisms, and global network performance metrics such as transport capacity, transmit capacity and information efficiency are covered. Having clearly established the potential benefits of the utilization of location information in wireless systems, and quantified the corresponding communication costs involved, we then turn our attention to a deep discussion of state-of-the-art and further advanced localization algorithm. In particular, the elementary types of data that can be exploited to produce location information, namely, connectivity, spatial correlation measures, angle information and finally, distance information are first addressed. Next, we review the most common and best-performing class of localization methods, namely distance-based algorithms, with a particular focus on the network localization application where devices are able to communicate with several other devices in their neighborhood (mesh topologies), such as in ad
hoc, sensor, and future cooperative networks. Several of the most important and recently proposed approaches are described in detail, including the semidefinite and linear programming methods, gradient-based smoothed and majorized methods, as well as algebraic methods. In the sequel, the most relevant additional issues afflicting network localization systems, such as flip-ambiguity, LOS/NLOS conditions, the lack of absolute reference, and the choice between centralized and distributed approaches, are discussed. Finally, fundamental limits are reviewed and used to compare and assess the accuracies of the algorithms described.

Wireless networks are on the verge of a third phase of growth. The first phase was dominated by voice traffic, and the second phase, which we are currently in, is dominated by data traffic. In the third phase, we predict that the traffic will be dominated by video and will require new ways to optimize the network to prevent saturation. This increase in video traffic is one of the key drivers of the evolution to new mobile broadband standards like WiMAX 802.16m and 3G LTE and LTE Advanced, motivating the need for enhancing the video service capabilities of future cellular and mobile broadband systems. Therefore, it is important to understand both the potential and limitations of these networks for delivering video content in the future, which will include more than the traditional video broadcasts, but also video streaming and uploading in the uplink direction. In that vein, this tutorial will provide an overview of technology options for enabling broadcast and unicast video services over WiMAX and LTE networks, review related standardization activities and present new techniques which could be exploited to further enhance the video capacity and quality of user experience. Finally, we will address some of the promising longer term research vectors for enhancing video service capabilities over mobile broadband, such as cross-layer design, joint source-channel coding and distortion-aware link adaptation and resource allocation, and discuss related future technical challenges.

Cooperation is known as an effective strategy in nature to achieve individual or common goals by forming cooperative groups. As the crossover between nature and engineering has always been fruitful, this tutorial is introducing cooperative concepts for wireless networks advocating mobile devices to cluster in a peer-to-peer fashion. In three lectures cooperation is advocated to overcome the most critical problems in mobile communication, known as energy consumption, security, and higher data rates. The first part will introduce the main rules for cooperation. Whether to cooperate or act autonomously has to be decided by each mobile device individually. Following the rule "The real egoistic behavior is to cooperate", mutual aid among mobile devices will be applied if and only if it is beneficial for all group members. The second part is presenting cooperation concepts at the different protocol layers from applications to the physical layer. In the last part topics such as social mobile networks, game theory and genetic programming are presented.