Soft information based protocols in network coded relay networks

Future wireless networks aim at providing higher quality of service (QoS) to mobile users. The emergence of relay technologies has shed light on new methodologies through which the system capacity can be dramatically increased with low deployment cost. In this thesis, novel relay technologies have been proposed in two practical scenarios: wireless sensor networks (WSN) and cellular networks. In practical WSN designs, energy conservation is the single most important requirement. This thesis draws attention to a multiple access relay channels model in the WSN. The network coded symbol for the received signals from correlated sources has been derived; the network coded symbol vector is then converted into a sparse vector, after which a compressive sensing (CS) technique is applied over the sparse signals. A theoretical proof analysis is derived regarding the reliability of the network coded symbol formed in the proposed protocol. The proposed protocol results in a better bit error rate (BER) performance in comparison to the direct implementation of CS on the EF protocol. Simulation results validate our analyses. Another hot topic is the application of relay technologies to the cellular networks. In this thesis, a practical two-way transmission scheme is proposed based on the EF protocol and the network coding technique. A trellis coded quantization/modulation (TCQ/M) scheme is used in the network coding process. The soft network coded symbols are quantized into only one bit thus requiring the same transmission bandwidth as the simplest decode-and-forward protocol. The probability density function of the network coded symbol is derived to help to form the quantization codebook for the TCQ. Simulations show that the proposed soft forwarding protocol can achieve full diversity with only a transmission rate of 1, and its BER performance is equivalent to that of an unquantized EF protocol