An Upper Bound on Multi-hop Transmission Capacity with Dynamic Routing Selection

This paper develops upper bounds on the end-to-end transmission capacity of multi-hop wireless networks. Potential source-destination paths are dynamically selected from a pool of randomly located relays, from which a closed-form lower bound on the outage probability is derived in terms of the expected number of potential paths. This is in turn used to provide an upper bound on the number of successful transmissions that can occur per unit area, which is known as the transmission capacity. The upper bound results from assuming independence among the potential paths, and can be viewed as the maximum diversity case. A useful aspect of the upper bound is its simple form for an arbitrary-sized network, which allows insights into how the number of hops and other network parameters affect spatial throughput in the non-asymptotic regime. The outage probability analysis is then extended to account for retransmissions with a maximum number of allowed attempts. In contrast to prevailing wisdom, we show that predetermined routing (such as nearest-neighbor) is suboptimal, since more hops are not useful once the network is interference-limited. Our results also make clear that randomness in the location of relay sets and dynamically varying channel states is helpful in obtaining higher aggregate throughput, and that dynamic route selection should be used to exploit path diversity.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 201

OFDM Wireless Optical Communication Systems with Serial Relays Over Exponentially Modeled Turbulence Channels

The optical wireless communication systems attract very significant research and commercial interest, the last years, due to their high availability, and performance characteristics with relatively low installation and operational cost. On the other hand, due to the fact that the optical channel which is used in this technology is the atmosphere, their performance depends strongly on the atmospheric conditions and the link’s characteristics. Thus, the effective distance that these systems can cover is relatively short. Thus, in many cases where the long distance signal propagation using wireless optical systems, is necessary, relay nodes are used. In this work, we study the performance of a wireless optical system, which is using the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) technique and relay nodes which decode and retransmit the received signal, over atmospheric turbulence channels modeled with the negative exponential distribution. For this system, we derive closed form mathematical expressions for its outage probability and average bit error rate (BER). Finally, we present the corresponding numerical results for realistic cases with common parameter values

State-of-the-art in Power Line Communications: from the Applications to the Medium

In recent decades, power line communication has attracted considerable attention from the research community and industry, as well as from regulatory and standardization bodies. In this article we provide an overview of both narrowband and broadband systems, covering potential applications, regulatory and standardization efforts and recent research advancements in channel characterization, physical layer performance, medium access and higher layer specifications and evaluations. We also identify areas of current and further study that will enable the continued success of power line communication technology.Comment: 19 pages, 12 figures. Accepted for publication, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. Special Issue on Power Line Communications and its Integration with the Networking Ecosystem. 201

Capacity of Wireless Ad Hoc Networks with Opportunistic Collaborative Communications

Optimal multihop routing in ad hoc networks requires the exchange of control messages at the MAC and network layer in order to set up the (centralized) optimization problem. Distributed opportunistic space-time collaboration (OST) is a valid alternative that avoids this drawback by enabling opportunistic cooperation with the source at the physical layer. In this paper, the performance of OST is investigated. It is shown analytically that opportunistic collaboration outperforms (centralized) optimal multihop in case spatial reuse (i.e., the simultaneous transmission of more than one data stream) is not allowed by the transmission protocol. Conversely, in case spatial reuse is possible, the relative performance between the two protocols has to be studied case by case in terms of the corresponding capacity regions, given the topology and the physical parameters of network at hand. Simulation results confirm that opportunistic collaborative communication is a promising paradigm for wireless ad hoc networks that deserves further investigation