Cooperative Symbol-Based Signaling for Networks with Multiple Relays

Wireless channels suffer from severe inherent impairments and hence reliable and high data rate wireless transmission is particularly challenging to achieve. Fortunately, using multiple antennae improves performance in wireless transmission by providing space diversity, spatial multiplexing, and power gains. However, in wireless ad-hoc networks multiple antennae may not be acceptable due to limitations in size, cost, and hardware complexity. As a result, cooperative relaying strategies have attracted considerable attention because of their abilities to take advantage of multi-antenna by using multiple single-antenna relays. This study is to explore cooperative signaling for different relay networks, such as multi-hop relay networks formed by multiple single-antenna relays and multi-stage relay networks formed by multiple relaying stages with each stage holding several single-antenna relays. The main contribution of this study is the development of a new relaying scheme for networks using symbol-level modulation, such as binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK). We also analyze effects of this newly developed scheme when it is used with space-time coding in a multi-stage relay network. Simulation results demonstrate that the new scheme outperforms previously proposed schemes: amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme and decode-and-forward (DF) scheme

Hardware Impairments Aware Transceiver Design for Full-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward MIMO Relaying

In this work we study the behavior of a full-duplex (FD) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relay with multiple antennas, where hardware impairments of the FD relay transceiver is taken into account. Due to the inter-dependency of the transmit relay power on each antenna and the residual self-interference in an FD-AF relay, we observe a distortion loop that degrades the system performance when the relay dynamic range is not high. In this regard, we analyze the relay function in presence of the hardware inaccuracies and an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the signal to distortion-plus-noise ratio (SDNR), under relay and source transmit power constraints. Due to the problem complexity, we propose a gradient-projection-based (GP) algorithm to obtain an optimal solution. Moreover, a nonalternating sub-optimal solution is proposed by assuming a rank-1 relay amplification matrix, and separating the design of the relay process into multiple stages (MuStR1). The proposed MuStR1 method is then enhanced by introducing an alternating update over the optimization variables, denoted as AltMuStR1 algorithm. It is observed that compared to GP, (Alt)MuStR1 algorithms significantly reduce the required computational complexity at the expense of a slight performance degradation. Finally, the proposed methods are evaluated under various system conditions, and compared with the methods available in the current literature. In particular, it is observed that as the hardware impairments increase, or for a system with a high transmit power, the impact of applying a distortion-aware design is significant.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

A Simple Cooperative Diversity Method Based on Network Path Selection

Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless environments. However most of the proposed solutions require distributed space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel scheme, that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this best relay for cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided. Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M nodes is required, such as those proposed in [7]. The simplicity of the technique, allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption could provide for improved flexibility, reliability and efficiency in future 4G wireless systems.Comment: To appear, IEEE JSAC, special issue on 4

Rate Balancing in Full-Duplex MIMO Two-Way Relay Networks

Maximizing the minimum rate for a full-duplex multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless network encompassing two sources and a two-way (TW) relay operating in a two hop manner is investigated. To improve the overall performance, using a zero-forcing approach at the relay to suppress the residual self-interference arising from full-duplex (FD) operation, the underlying max-min problem is cast as an optimization problem which is non-convex. To circumvent this issue, semidefinite relaxation technique is employed, leading to upper and lower bound solutions for the optimization problem. Numerical results verify that the upper and lower bound solutions closely follow each other, showing that the proposed approach results in a close-to-optimal solution. In addition, the impact of residual self-interference upon the overall performance of the network in terms of the minimum rate is illustrated by numerical results, and for low residual self-interference scenarios the superiority of the proposed method compared to an analogous half-duplex (HD) counterpart is shown

How to Understand LMMSE Transceiver Design for MIMO Systems From Quadratic Matrix Programming

In this paper, a unified linear minimum mean-square-error (LMMSE) transceiver design framework is investigated, which is suitable for a wide range of wireless systems. The unified design is based on an elegant and powerful mathematical programming technology termed as quadratic matrix programming (QMP). Based on QMP it can be observed that for different wireless systems, there are certain common characteristics which can be exploited to design LMMSE transceivers e.g., the quadratic forms. It is also discovered that evolving from a point-to-point MIMO system to various advanced wireless systems such as multi-cell coordinated systems, multi-user MIMO systems, MIMO cognitive radio systems, amplify-and-forward MIMO relaying systems and so on, the quadratic nature is always kept and the LMMSE transceiver designs can always be carried out via iteratively solving a number of QMP problems. A comprehensive framework on how to solve QMP problems is also given. The work presented in this paper is likely to be the first shoot for the transceiver design for the future ever-changing wireless systems.Comment: 31 pages, 4 figures, Accepted by IET Communication