Improve Energy Efficiency In Cooperative Medium Access Control Protocol For Wireless Networks

Cooperative communication has drawn a substantial attention in recent years due to the efficient and optimal utilization of constraint resources in dynamic wireless networks at a reduced infrastructural deployment and cost. In the medium access control (MAC) layer perspective, two major problems are associated with cooperative networks. The ability of cooperative MAC (CMAC) protocols to achieve multi-objective target orientation limit their adaptation to the future generation of wireless networks, since most of the existing protocols focus only on a single target objective. Besides, the sustainability of energy-constrained wireless networks due to limited energy supply capacity hinders their performance to ensure stable and reliable communication. These aforementioned problems limit the adaptation of the existing protocols to fit into the future generation of wireless networks. To adequately address these problems, two distinct CMAC protocols are proposed in this thesis to cater for the unpredictable and dynamic nature of the wireless network. Firstly, a new network lifetime-aware CMAC protocol named LEA-CMAC is proposed for energy-constrained wireless ad-hoc networks. An optimization problem is formulated with an objective of extending the lifetime of the network. The solution to this non-linear problem is provided in terms of optimal transmit power at the source and relay terminals in symmetric and asymmetric transmit power policies. The solution provided by this protocol is limited in terms of energy efficiency and network lifetime since the network totally rely on the helper nodes limited-powered batteries for their transmissions. Secondly, a novel CMAC protocol with radio frequency (RF) energy harvesting (EH) capability named EH-CMAC is proposed in a reactive relaying energy-constrained wireless ad-hoc networks to address the limitation in the earlier proposed LEA-CMAC protocol. The protocol possesses the ability to ensure a sustainable and reliable wireless connectivity in a dynamic wireless environment through the selection of an appropriate transmission mode that best suits the instantaneous network requirement. The protocol comprises of two distinct energy-efficient techniques namely, the outage probability quality-of-service (QoS) requirement and the transmit power optimization techniques which are applied in both traditional and EH relaying schemes. These techniques are selected and adapted based on the instantaneous network information and target objectives. In addition, a distributed and adaptive relay selection backoff process is proposed in each case to satisfy the available network information and achieve a multi-objective target oriented protocol. Through extensive simulation and comparison with existing CMAC protocols, the results show that LEA-CMAC extend the network lifetime by 85.67% over an existing CMAC protocol, while EH-CMAC extends the network lifetime by 90.99% over a traditional CMAC protocol. Thus, both protocols achieve a multi-objective target orientation under general circumstances

Trading Wireless Information and Power Transfer: Relay Selection to Minimize the Outage Probability

This paper studies the outage probability minimization problem for a multiple relay network with energy harvesting constraints. The relays are hybrid nodes used for simultaneous wireless information and power transfer from the source radio frequency (RF) signals. There is a trade-off associated with the amount of time a relay node is used for energy and information transfer. Large intervals of information transfer implies little time for energy harvesting from RF signals and thus, high probability of outage events. We propose relay selection schemes for a cooperative system with a fixed number of RF powered relays. We address both causal and non-causal channel state information cases at the relay--destination link and evaluate the trade-off associated with information/power transfer in the context of minimization of outage probability.Comment: IEEE GlobalSiP, 201

Wireless Energy Harvesting with Amplify-and-Forward Relaying and Link Adaptation under Imperfect Feedback Channel

Energy harvesting is an alternative approach to extend the lifetime of wireless communications and decrease energy consumption, which results in fewer carbon emissions from wireless networks. In this study, adaptive modulation with EH relay is proposed. A power splitting mechanism for EH relay is used. The relay harvests energy from the source and forwards the information to the destination. A genetic algorithm (GA) is applied for the optimisation of the power splitting ratio at the relays. Two scenarios are considered namely, perfect and imperfect feedback channels. Results show that the spectral efficiency (SE) degradation, which is due to an imperfect feedback channel, was approximately 14% for conventional relays. The use of energy harvesting results in a degradation in the performance of SE of approximately 19% in case of a perfect feedback channel. Finally, an increase in the number of energy harvesting relays enhances the SE by 22%

Exploiting Diversity in Broadband Wireless Relay Networks

Fading is one of the most fundamental impairments to wireless communications. The standard approach to combating fading is by adding redundancy - or diversity - to help increase coverage and transmission speed. Motivated by the results in multiple-input multiple-output technologies, which are usually used at base stations or access points, cooperation commutation has been proposed to improve the performance of wireless networks which consist of low-cost single antenna devices. While the majority of the research in cooperative communication focuses on flat fading for its simplicity and easy analysis, in practice the underlying channels in broadband wireless communication systems such as cellular systems (UMTS/LTE) are more likely to exhibit frequency selective fading. In this dissertation, we consider a frequency selective fading channel model and explore distributed diversity techniques in broadband wireless relay networks, with consideration to practical issues such as channel estimation and complexity-performance tradeoffs. We first study a system model with one source, one destination and multiple decode-and-forward (DF) relays which share a single channel orthogonal to the source. We derive the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for several relaying strategies: best relay selection, random relay selection, and the case when all decoding relays participate. The best relay selection method selects the relay in the decoding set with the largest sum-squared relay-to-destination channel coefficients. This scheme can achieve the optimal DMT of the system at the expense of higher complexity, compared to the other two relaying strategies which do not always exploit the spatial diversity offered by the relays. Different from flat fading, we find special cases when the three relaying strategies have the same DMT. We further present a transceiver design and prove it can achieve the optimal DMT asymptotically. Monte Carlo simulations are presented to corroborate the theoretical analysis. We provide a detailed performance comparison of the three relaying strategies in channels encountered in practice. The work has been extended to systems with multiple amplify-and-forward relays. We propose two relay selection schemes with maximum likelihood sequential estimator and linear zero- forcing equalization at the destination respectively and both schemes can asymptotically achieve the optimal DMT. We next extend the results in the two-hop network, as previously studied, to multi-hop networks. In particular, we consider the routing problem in clustered multi-hop DF relay networks since clustered multi-hop wireless networks have attracted significant attention for their robustness to fading, hierarchical structure, and ability to exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless channel. We propose an opportunistic routing (or relay selection) algorithm for such networks. In contrast to the majority of existing approaches to routing in clustered networks, our algorithm only requires channel state information in the final hop, which is shown to be essential for reaping the diversity offered by the channel. In addition to exploiting the available diversity, our simple cross-layer algorithm has the flexibility to satisfy an additional routing objective such as maximization of network lifetime. We demonstrate through analysis and simulation that our proposed routing algorithm attains full diversity under certain conditions on the cluster sizes, and its diversity is equal to the diversity of more complicated approaches that require full channel state information. The final part of this dissertation considers channel estimation in relay networks. Channel state information is vital for exploiting diversity in cooperative networks. The existing literature on cooperative channel estimation assumes that block lengths are long and that channel estimation takes place within a fading block. However, if the forwarding delay needs to be reduced, short block lengths are preferred, and adaptive estimation through multiple blocks is required. In particular, we consider estimating the relay-to-destination channel in DF relay systems for which the presence of forwarded information is probabilistic since it is unknown whether the relay participates in the forwarding phase. A detector is used so that the update of the least mean square channel estimate is made only when the detector decides the presence of training data. We use the generalized likelihood ratio test and focus on the detector threshold for deciding whether the training sequence is present. We also propose a heuristic objective function which leads to a proper threshold to improve the convergence speed and reduce the estimation error. Extensive numerical results show the superior performance of using this threshold as opposed to fixed thresholds

Relay Selection Considering Successive Packets Transmission in Cooperative Communication Networks

Relay selection has been regarded as an effective method to improve the performance of cooperative communication system. However, frequent operation of relay selection can bring enormous control message overhead and thereby decrease the performance of cooperative communication. To reduce the relay selection frequency, in this paper, we propose a relay selection scheme to choose the best relay with considering successive packets transmission. In this scheme, according to the length of data packet, data transmission rate and the estimated channel state information (CSI), the best relay is selected to maximize the number of successive packets transmission under the condition that the given symbol-error-rate (SER) is kept. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed relay selection scheme can support the operation of successive packets transmission in cooperative wireless networks and that the maximum number of successive packets transmission is affected by the different network parameters, i.e., data transmission rate, packet length and Doppler frequency at one relay node