A Comparison of Superposition Coding Schemes

There are two variants of superposition coding schemes. Cover's original superposition coding scheme has code clouds of the identical shape, while Bergmans's superposition coding scheme has code clouds of independently generated shapes. These two schemes yield identical achievable rate regions in several scenarios, such as the capacity region for degraded broadcast channels. This paper shows that under the optimal maximum likelihood decoding, these two superposition coding schemes can result in different rate regions. In particular, it is shown that for the two-receiver broadcast channel, Cover's superposition coding scheme can achieve rates strictly larger than Bergmans's scheme.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT 2013

Maximising Average Energy Efficiency for Two-User AWGN Broadcast Channel

Energy consumption has become an increasingly important aspect of wireless communications, from both an economical and environmental point of view. New enhancements are being placed on mobile networks to reduce the power consumption of both mobile terminals and base stations. This paper studies the achievable rate region of AWGN broadcast channels under Time-division, Frequency-division and Superposition coding, and locates the optimal energyefficient rate-pair according to a comparison metric based on the average energy efficiency of the system. In addition to the transmit power, circuit power and signalling power are also incorporated in the energy efficiency function, with simulation results verifying that the Superposition coding scheme achieves the highest energy efficiency in an ideal, but non-realistic scenario, where the signalling power is zero. With moderate signalling power, the Frequency-division scheme is the most energy-efficient, with Superposition coding and Time-division becoming second and third best. Conversely, when the signalling power is high, both Timedivision and Frequency-division schemes outperform Superposition coding. On the other hand, the Superposition coding scheme also incorporates rate-fairness into the system, which allows both users to transmit whilst maximising the energy efficiency

A digital interface for Gaussian relay networks: lifting codes from the discrete superposition model to Gaussian relay networks

For every Gaussian relay network with a single source-destination pair, it is known that there exists a corresponding deterministic network called the discrete superposition network that approximates its capacity uniformly over all SNR's to within a bounded number of bits. The next step in this program of rigorous approximation is to determine whether coding schemes for discrete superposition models can be lifted to Gaussian relay networks with a bounded rate loss independent of SNR. We establish precisely this property and show that the superposition model can thus serve as a strong surrogate for designing codes for Gaussian relay networks. We show that a code for a Gaussian relay network, with a single source-destination pair and multiple relay nodes, can be designed from any code for the corresponding discrete superposition network simply by pruning it. In comparison to the rate of the discrete superposition network's code, the rate of the Gaussian network's code only reduces at most by a constant that is a function only of the number of nodes in the network and independent of channel gains. This result is also applicable for coding schemes for MIMO Gaussian relay networks, with the reduction depending additionally on the number of antennas. Hence, the discrete superposition model can serve as a digital interface for operating Gaussian relay networks.Comment: 5 pages, 2010 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, Cair

CQI reporting strategies for nonregenerative two-way relay networks

This paper considers data exchange between two terminals in a nonregenerative two-way relay network. We first propose two efficient channel quality indicator (CQI) reporting schemes based on XOR and superposition coding for single-relay networks. These schemes allow two terminals to simultaneously estimate the CQI of the distant link without incurring additional overhead. In addition, the transmission time for CQI feedback is reduced by half while the loss of performance is negligible. Upper and lower bounds of the mean square error (MSE) of the estimated CQI are derived to analyze various effects on the performance of the proposed schemes. We then extend our MSE analysis to multi-relay networks where a low-complexity relay selection scheme is proposed based on the derived bounds. Simulation results show that, in comparison with conventional methods, this suboptimal bound-based scheme achieves satisfac- tory performance while reducing the complexity at least three times in case of large number of relays

Achieving Marton's Region for Broadcast Channels Using Polar Codes

This paper presents polar coding schemes for the 2-user discrete memoryless broadcast channel (DM-BC) which achieve Marton's region with both common and private messages. This is the best achievable rate region known to date, and it is tight for all classes of 2-user DM-BCs whose capacity regions are known. To accomplish this task, we first construct polar codes for both the superposition as well as the binning strategy. By combining these two schemes, we obtain Marton's region with private messages only. Finally, we show how to handle the case of common information. The proposed coding schemes possess the usual advantages of polar codes, i.e., they have low encoding and decoding complexity and a super-polynomial decay rate of the error probability. We follow the lead of Goela, Abbe, and Gastpar, who recently introduced polar codes emulating the superposition and binning schemes. In order to align the polar indices, for both schemes, their solution involves some degradedness constraints that are assumed to hold between the auxiliary random variables and the channel outputs. To remove these constraints, we consider the transmission of $k$ blocks and employ a chaining construction that guarantees the proper alignment of the polarized indices. The techniques described in this work are quite general, and they can be adopted to many other multi-terminal scenarios whenever there polar indices need to be aligned.Comment: 26 pages, 11 figures, accepted to IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory and presented in part at ISIT'1