Power Optimisation and Relay Selection in Cooperative Wireless Communication Networks

Cooperative communications have emerged as a significant concept to improve reliability and throughput in wireless systems. In cooperative networks, the idea is to implement a scheme in wireless systems where the nodes can harmonize their resources thereby enhancing the network performance in different aspects such as latency, BER and throughput. As cooperation spans from the basic idea of transmit diversity achieved via MIMO techniques and the relay channel, it aims to reap somewhat multiple benefits of combating fading/burst errors, increasing throughput and reducing energy use. Another major benefit of cooperation in wireless networks is that since the concept only requires neighbouring nodes to act as virtual relay antennas, the concept evades the negative impacts of deployment costs of multiple physical antennas for network operators especially in areas where they are difficult to deploy. In cooperative communications energy efficiency and long network lifetimes are very important design issues, the focus in this work is on ad hoc and sensor network varieties where the nodes integrate sensing, processing and communication such that their cooperation capabilities are subject to power optimisation. As cooperation communications leads to trade-offs in Quality of Services and transmit power, the key design issue is power optimisation to dynamically combat channel fluctuations and achieve a net reduction of transmit power with the goal of saving battery life. Recent researches in cooperative communications focus on power optimisation achieved via power control at the PHY layer, and/or scheduling mechanism at the MAC layer. The approach for this work will be to review the power control strategy at the PHY layer, identify their associated trade-offs, and use this as a basis to propose a power control strategy that offers adaptability to channel conditions, the road to novelty in this work is a channel adaptable power control algorithm that jointly optimise power allocation, modulation strategy and relay selection. Thus, a novel relay selection method is developed and implemented to improve the performance of cooperative wireless networks in terms of energy consumption. The relay selection method revolves on selection the node with minimum distance to the source and destination. The design is valid to any wireless network setting especially Ad-hoc and sensor networks where space limitations preclude the implementation of bigger capacity battery. The thesis first investigates the design of relay selection schemes in cooperative networks and the associated protocols. Besides, modulation strategy and error correction code impact on energy consumption are investigated and the optimal solution is proposed and jointly implemented with the relay selection method. The proposed algorithm is extended to cooperative networks in which multiple nodes participate in cooperation in fixed and variable rate system. Thus, multi relay selection algorithm is proposed to improve virtual MIMO performance in terms of energy consumption. Furthermore, motivated by the trend of cell size optimisation in wireless networks, the proposed relay selection method is extended to clustered wireless networks, and jointly implemented with virtual clustering technique. The work will encompass three main stages: First, the cooperative system is designed and two major protocols Decode and Forward (DF) and amplify and forward (AF) are investigated. Second, the proposed algorithm is modelled and tested under different channel conditions with emphasis on its performance using different modulation strategies for different cooperative wireless networks. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated and verified via computer simulations. Simulation results show that the distance based relay selection algorithm exhibits an improved performance in terms of energy consumption compared to the conventional cooperative schemes under different cooperative communication scenarios

Efficient Power Allocation Schemes for Hybrid Decode-Amplify-Forward Relay Based Wireless Cooperative Network

Cooperative communication in various wireless domains, such as cellular networks, sensor networks and wireless ad hoc networks, has gained significant interest recently. In cooperative network, relays between the source and the destination, form a virtual MIMO that creates spatial diversity at the destination, which overcomes the fading effect of wireless channels. Such relay assisted schemes have potential to increase the channel capacity and network coverage. Most current research on cooperative communication are focused broadly on efficient protocol design and analysis, resource allocation, relay selection and cross layer optimization. The first part of this research aims at introducing hybrid decode-amplify-forward (HDAF) relaying in a distributed Alamouti coded cooperative network. Performance of such adaptive relaying scheme in terms of symbol error rate (SER), outage probability and average channel capacity is derived theoretically and verified through simulation based study. This work is further extended to a generalized multi HDAF relaying cooperative frame work. Various efficient power allocation schemes such as maximized channel capacity based, minimized SER based and total power minimization based are proposed and their superiority in performance over the existing equal power allocation scheme is demonstrated in the simulation results. Due to the broadcast nature of wireless transmission, information privacy in wireless networks becomes a critical issue. In the context of physical layer security, the role of multi HDAF relaying based cooperative model with control jamming and multiple eavesdroppers is explored in the second part of the research. Performance evaluation parameters such as secrecy rate, secrecy outage and intercept probability are derived theoretically. Further the importance of the proposed power allocation schemes in enhancing the secrecy performance of the network in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers is studied in detail through simulation based study and analysis. For all the proposed power allocation schemes in this research, the optimization problems are defined under total power constraint and are solved using Lagrange multiplier method and also evolutionary algorithms such as Differential evolution and Invasive Weed Optimization are employed. Monte Carlo simulation based study is adopted throughout the research. It is concluded that HDAF relaying based wireless cooperative network with optimal power allocation schemes offers improved and reliable performance compared to conventional amplify forward and decode forward relaying schemes. Above research contributions will be applicable for future generation wireless cooperative networks

Cooperative Transmission in Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks with Multiple Carrier Frequency Offsets: A Double-Differential Approach

As a result of the rapidly increasing mobility of sensor nodes, mobile wireless sensor networks (MWSNs) would be subject to multiple carrier frequency offsets (MCFOs), which result in time-varying channels and drastically degrade the network performance. To enhance the performance of such MWSNs, we propose a relay selection (RS) based double-differential (DD) cooperative transmission scheme, termed RSDDCT, in which the best relay sensor node is selected to forward the source sensor node’s signals to the destination sensor node with the detect-and-forward (DetF) protocol. Assuming a Rayleigh fading environment, first, exact closed-form expressions for the outage probability and average bit error rate (BER) of the RSDDCT scheme are derived. Then, simple and informative asymptotic outage probability and average BER expressions at the large signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime are presented, which reveal that the RSDDCT scheme can achieve full diversity. Furthermore, the optimum power allocation strategy in terms of minimizing the average BER is investigated, and simple analytical solutions are obtained. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RSDDCT scheme can achieve excellent performance over fading channels in the presence of unknown random MCFOs. It is also shown that the proposed optimum power allocation strategy offers substantial average BER performance improvement over the equal power allocation strategy

Markov Decision Processes with Applications in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of autonomous and resource-limited devices. The devices cooperate to monitor one or more physical phenomena within an area of interest. WSNs operate as stochastic systems because of randomness in the monitored environments. For long service time and low maintenance cost, WSNs require adaptive and robust methods to address data exchange, topology formulation, resource and power optimization, sensing coverage and object detection, and security challenges. In these problems, sensor nodes are to make optimized decisions from a set of accessible strategies to achieve design goals. This survey reviews numerous applications of the Markov decision process (MDP) framework, a powerful decision-making tool to develop adaptive algorithms and protocols for WSNs. Furthermore, various solution methods are discussed and compared to serve as a guide for using MDPs in WSNs

Principles of Physical Layer Security in Multiuser Wireless Networks: A Survey

This paper provides a comprehensive review of the domain of physical layer security in multiuser wireless networks. The essential premise of physical-layer security is to enable the exchange of confidential messages over a wireless medium in the presence of unauthorized eavesdroppers without relying on higher-layer encryption. This can be achieved primarily in two ways: without the need for a secret key by intelligently designing transmit coding strategies, or by exploiting the wireless communication medium to develop secret keys over public channels. The survey begins with an overview of the foundations dating back to the pioneering work of Shannon and Wyner on information-theoretic security. We then describe the evolution of secure transmission strategies from point-to-point channels to multiple-antenna systems, followed by generalizations to multiuser broadcast, multiple-access, interference, and relay networks. Secret-key generation and establishment protocols based on physical layer mechanisms are subsequently covered. Approaches for secrecy based on channel coding design are then examined, along with a description of inter-disciplinary approaches based on game theory and stochastic geometry. The associated problem of physical-layer message authentication is also introduced briefly. The survey concludes with observations on potential research directions in this area.Comment: 23 pages, 10 figures, 303 refs. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1303.1609 by other authors. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 201