Month: April 2021

Stochastic geometry (is) fun – part 3

This is a true story. Not 100% comic but also showing an interesting point of view.

Reviewer 2:“This is a well-written paper. But it uses probability theory.”

A case for T junctions

It has been established (for example, here) that the standard two-dimensional homogeneous PPP is not an adequate model for vehicular networks, since vehicles are mostly confined to streets. The Poisson line Cox process (PLCP) has naturally emerged as the model of choice. In this process, one-dimensional PPPs are placed on a street system formed by a Poisson line process. This model is somewhat tractable and thus has gained some traction in the community. With probability 1 each line (or street) intersects with each other line, so intersections are formed, and the communication performance at the typical intersection vehicles can be studied. This is important since vehicles at intersections are more accident-prone than other vehicles.

How about T junctions? Clearly, the PLCP has no T junctions a.s. But while not quite as frequent as (four-way) intersections, they are an important building block of the street systems in every city, and it is reasonable to assume that they inherit some of the dangers of intersections. However, the performance of vehicles at T junctions have barely been modeled and analyzed. The reason is perhaps not that it is not worthy of study but the lack of a natural model. Let’s say we wanted to construct a Cox model of vehicles that is supported on a street system that has no intersections but only T junctions, with the T junctions themselves forming a stationary point process (in the same way the intersections in the PLCP form a stationary point process). What is the simplest (most natural, most tractable) model?

One model we came up with is inspired by the so-called lilypond model. From each point of a PPP, a line segment grows in a random orientation in both directions. All segments grow at the same speed until one of their endpoints hit another segment. Once all growth has stopped, the lilypond street model is obtained. Here is a realization:

*Figure 1. Realization of Lilypond street model, starting with a PPP of density 0.1.*

Then PPPs of vehicles can be placed on each line segment to form a Lilypond line segment Cox process. Some results for vehicular networks based on this model are available here. The model has the advantage that it has only a single parameter – the density of the underlying PPP of the center points of each line segment. On the other hand, the distribution of the length of the line segments can only be bounded, and the construction naturally creates a dependence between the lengths of nearby segments, which limits the tractability. For instance, in a region with many initial Poisson points, segments will be short on average, while in a region with sparse Poisson points, segments will be long. Also, the construction implies that simulating this process takes significantly more time than simulating a PLCP.

Given the shortcoming of the model, it seems quite probable that there are other, simpler and (even) more natural models for street systems with T junctions. Let’s try and find them!

The typical user and her malfunctioning base station

Let us consider a cellular network with Poisson distributed base stations (BSs). We assume that in each Voronoi cell, one user is located uniformly at random (and independently across cells), and, naturally, the user is connected to the nucleus of that cell. This is the user point process of type I defined in this article. In this case, the typical user, named Alice, does reside in the typical cell since there is no size-biased sampling involved in defining the typical user. The downlink SIR performance of this network has been analyzed here (SIR distribution) and here (SIR meta distribution).

Suddenly and unfortunately, Alice’s serving BS is malfunctioning. Her downlink is, well, down, and she gets reconnected to the next-nearest one. How does that affect her SIR performance?
In another network, also with Poisson BSs, lives another type of typical user, namely that of a stationary point process of users that is independent of the base station process. This typical user’s name is Bob. Bob’s SIR performance is the same as the one measured at an arbitrary deterministic location on the plane, as discussed in this post. He resides in the 0-cell, not the typical cell. So in his case, the typical user does not reside in the typical cell.

Noticing that Alice’s original BS ceased to operate, Bob says: “I think now your SIR performance is the same as mine. After all, your cell was formed by adding a BS at the origin, while my network has no such BS. With that added BS removed, we are in the same situation.”

Alice responds: “You may have a point, but I am not sure that my location is uniform in the 0-cell, as yours is.”

Bob: “Good point, but wouldn’t that be the natural conjecture?”

Alice: “I am not sure. How about we verify? Let’s look at the distances.”

Bob: “Ok. For me, if B_n is the distance to my n-th nearest BS, we have

$\displaystyle \pi\mathbb{E}(B_n^2)=n.$

Alice: “For me, the distance A₁ to the malfunctioning BS satisfies π𝔼(A₁²)≈10/13, by the properties of the typical cell. If you are correct, then the distribution of A₂ should be the same as that of B₁. But that’s not the case, see this figure.”

Mean squared distances times π. For Alice, the distances are A_n, for Bob, B_n.

Bob: “I see – your new serving BS at distance A₂ is quite a bit further away than mine at B₁. So my conjecture was wrong.“

Alice: “Yes, but the question of how resilient a cellular network is to BS outages is an interesting one. How about we compare the SIR performance with and without BS outage in different networks, say Poisson networks and lattice networks? I bet Poisson networks are more robust, in the sense that the downlink SIR statistics change less when there is an outage and users need to be handed off to the next-nearest BS.“

Bob: “Hmm… that would make sense. But would that mean we should build clustered networks, to achieve even higher robustness?“

Alice: “Possibly – if all we worry about is a small loss when a user is offloaded. But we should take into account the absolute performance also, and clustered networks are worse in this regard. If the starting performance is much higher, it is acceptable to have a somewhat bigger loss due to outage and handover.“

Bob: “Makes sense. Sorry, I have to go. My SIR is so high that I just got a phone call.“