Wireless Network Information Flow: A Deterministic Approach

In a wireless network with a single source and a single destination and an arbitrary number of relay nodes, what is the maximum rate of information flow achievable? We make progress on this long standing problem through a two-step approach. First we propose a deterministic channel model which captures the key wireless properties of signal strength, broadcast and superposition. We obtain an exact characterization of the capacity of a network with nodes connected by such deterministic channels. This result is a natural generalization of the celebrated max-flow min-cut theorem for wired networks. Second, we use the insights obtained from the deterministic analysis to design a new quantize-map-and-forward scheme for Gaussian networks. In this scheme, each relay quantizes the received signal at the noise level and maps it to a random Gaussian codeword for forwarding, and the final destination decodes the source's message based on the received signal. We show that, in contrast to existing schemes, this scheme can achieve the cut-set upper bound to within a gap which is independent of the channel parameters. In the case of the relay channel with a single relay as well as the two-relay Gaussian diamond network, the gap is 1 bit/s/Hz. Moreover, the scheme is universal in the sense that the relays need no knowledge of the values of the channel parameters to (approximately) achieve the rate supportable by the network. We also present extensions of the results to multicast networks, half-duplex networks and ergodic networks.Comment: To appear in IEEE transactions on Information Theory, Vol 57, No 4, April 201

Two-path succesive relaying schemes in the presence of inter-relay interference

Relaying is a promising technique to improve wireless network performance. A conventional relay transmits and receives signals in two orthogonal channels due to half duplex constraint of wireless network. This results in inefficient use of spectral resources. Two-Path Successive Relaying (TPSR) has been proposed to recover loss in spectral efficiency. However, the performance of TPSR is degraded by Inter-Relay Interference (IRI). This thesis investigates the performance of TPSR affected by IRI and proposes several schemes to improve relaying reliability, throughput and secrecy. Simulations revealed that the existing TPSR could perform worse than the conventional Half Duplex Relaying (HDR) scheme. Opportunistic TPSR schemes are proposed to improve the capacity performance. Several relay pair selection criteria are developed to ensure the selection of the best performing relay pair. Adaptive schemes which dynamically switch between TPSR and conventional HDR are proposed to further improve the performance. Simulation and analytical results show that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 45% ergodic capacity improvement and lower outage probability compared to baseline schemes, while achieving the maximum diversity and multiplexing tradeoff of the multi-input single-output channel. In addition, this thesis proposes secrecy TPSR schemes to protect secrecy of wireless transmission from eavesdropper. The use of two relays in the proposed schemes deliver more robust secrecy transmission while the use of scheduled jamming signals improves secrecy rate. Simulation and analytical results reveal that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 62% ergodic secrecy capacity improvement and quadratically lower intercept and secrecy outage probabilities if compared to existing schemes. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that the proposed TPSR schemes are able to deliver performance improvement in terms of throughput, reliability and secrecy in the presence of IRI

Scaling Laws for Infrastructure Single and Multihop Wireless Networks in Wideband Regimes

With millimeter wave bands emerging as a strong candidate for 5G cellular networks, next-generation systems may be in a unique position where spectrum is plentiful. To assess the potential value of this spectrum, this paper derives scaling laws on the per mobile downlink feasible rate with large bandwidth and number of nodes, for both Infrastructure Single Hop (ISH) and Infrastructure Multi-Hop (IMH) architectures. It is shown that, for both cases, there exist \emph{critical bandwidth scalings} above which increasing the bandwidth no longer increases the feasible rate per node. These critical thresholds coincide exactly with the bandwidths where, for each architecture, the network transitions from being degrees-of-freedom-limited to power-limited. For ISH, this critical bandwidth threshold is lower than IMH when the number of users per base station grows with network size. This result suggests that multi-hop transmissions may be necessary to fully exploit large bandwidth degrees of freedom in deployments with growing number of users per cell.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

Cross-Layer Optimization of Fast Video Delivery in Cache-Enabled Relaying Networks

This paper investigates the cross-layer optimization of fast video delivery and caching for minimization of the overall video delivery time in a two-hop relaying network. The half-duplex relay nodes are equipped with both a cache and a buffer which facilitate joint scheduling of fetching and delivery to exploit the channel diversity for improving the overall delivery performance. The fast delivery control is formulated as a two-stage functional non-convex optimization problem. By exploiting the underlying convex and quasi-convex structures, the problem can be solved exactly and efficiently by the developed algorithm. Simulation results show that significant caching and buffering gains can be achieved with the proposed framework, which translates into a reduction of the overall video delivery time. Besides, a trade-off between caching and buffering gains is unveiled.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; accepted for presentation at IEEE Globecom, San Diego, CA, Dec. 201