Alternative Awaiting and Broadcast for Two-Way Relay Fading Channels

We investigate a two-way relay (TWR) fading channel where two source nodes wish to exchange information with the help of a relay node. Given traditional TWR protocols, transmission rates in both directions are known to be limited by the hop with lower capacity, i.e., the min operations between uplink and downlink. In this paper, we propose a new transmission protocol, named as alternative awaiting and broadcast (AAB), to cancel the min operations in the TWR fading channels. The operational principles, new upper bound on ergodic sum-capacity (ESC) and convergence behavior of average delay of signal transmission (ST) (in relay buffer) for the proposed AAB protocol are analyzed. Moreover, we propose a suboptimal encoding/decoding solution for the AAB protocol and derive an achievable ergodic sum-rate (ESR) with corresponding average delay of ST. Numerical results show that 1) the proposed AAB protocol significantly improves the achievable ESR compared to the traditional TWR protocols, 2) considering the average delay of system service (SS) (in source buffer), the average delay of ST induced by the proposed AAB protocol is very small and negligible.Comment: to appear in IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, 201

Achieving reliable and enhanced communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophyWith the envisioned age of Internet of Things (IoTs), different aspects of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) will be linked so as to advance road transportation safety, ease congestion of road traffic, lessen air pollution, improve passenger transportation comfort and significantly reduce road accidents. In vehicular networks, regular exchange of current position, direction, speed, etc., enable mobile vehicle to foresee an imminent vehicle accident and notify the driver early enough in order to take appropriate action(s) or the vehicle on its own may take adequate preventive measures to avert the looming accident. Actualizing this concept requires use of shared media access protocol that is capable of guaranteeing reliable and timely broadcast of safety messages. This dissertation investigates the use of Network Coding (NC) techniques to enrich the content of each transmission and ensure improved high reliability of the broadcasted safety messages with less number of retransmissions. A Code Aided Retransmission-based Error Recovery (CARER) protocol is proposed. In order to avoid broadcast storm problem, a rebroadcasting vehicle selection metric η, is developed, which is used to select a vehicle that will rebroadcast the received encoded message. Although the proposed CARER protocol demonstrates an impressive performance, the level of incurred overhead is fairly high due to the use of complex rebroadcasting vehicle selection metric. To resolve this issue, a Random Network Coding (RNC) and vehicle clustering based vehicular communication scheme with low algorithmic complexity, named Reliable and Enhanced Cooperative Cross-layer MAC (RECMAC) scheme, is proposed. The use of this clustering technique enables RECMAC to subdivide the vehicular network into small manageable, coordinated clusters which further improve transmission reliability and minimise negative impact of network overhead. Similarly, a Cluster Head (CH) selection metric ℱ(\u1d457) is designed, which is used to determine and select the most suitably qualified candidate to become the CH of a particular cluster. Finally, in order to investigate the impact of available radio spectral resource, an in-depth study of the required amount of spectrum sufficient to support high transmission reliability and minimum latency requirements of critical road safety messages in vehicular networks was carried out. The performance of the proposed schemes was clearly shown with detailed theoretical analysis and was further validated with simulation experiments

Hierarchical modulation with signal space and transmit diversity in Nakagami-m fading channel.

M. Sc. Eng. University of KwaZulu-Natal 2013.Hierarchical modulation (HM) is a promising scheme for wireless image and video transmission, exploiting the benefits of unequal error protection to ensure enhanced system performance. However, there is a limiting factor to the benefits of using only hierarchy to improve bit error rate (BER) performance of a transmission system. Diversity, namely signal space diversity (SSD) and Alamouti transmit diversity (ATD), can be introduced to improve BER performance results for HM systems. This dissertation presents the BER analysis of hierarchically modulated QAM with SSD and using maximal ratio combining (MRC) to retrieve the transmitted symbol from receiver antennas. In addition, the study includes the BER analysis of an identical system in an ATD scheme employing two transmit antennas and receiver antennas with MRC. SSD comprises of two fundamental stages: constellation rotation and component interleaving. The angle at which the constellation is rotated can affect the performance of the system. In the past, the rotation angle is determined based on a design criterion which maximizes the diversity order by minimizing the Euclidean square product or, alternatively, minimizes an SER expression. In this dissertation, a simple method for determining a rotation angle at which system performance is optimal for hierarchical constellations is presented. Previously, the BER analysis for HM involves an intricate approach where the probability of an error occurring is determined by considering the probability of a transmitted symbol exceeding past a set decision boundary. This dissertation presents the Nearest Neighbor (NN) union bound approach for determining an accurate approximation of the BER of an HM system with SSD. This method of analysis is later extended for an ATD scheme employing HM with SSD. Although introducing diversity elevates the system performance constraints on HM, it does so at the cost of detection complexity. To address this issue, a reduced complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) based detector is also proposed. While the conventional ML detector performs an exhaustive search to find the minimum Euclidean distance between the received symbol and all possible modulated symbols, the proposed detector only considers the nearest neighbors of the received symbol. By reducing the number of comparisons, a complexity reduction of 51.43% between the proposed detector and the optimal detector for 16-QAM is found

PSM-DMO: power save mode and discontinuous BLE mesh operation

The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh profile, standardized by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), has an increasing interest in IoT solutions. However, the standard assumes that relay and friend nodes should be continuously scanning the channel awaiting any incoming transmissions. This could be very inefficient in terms of energy consumption, particularly in application scenarios where the backbone of the mesh network cannot be powered and traffic is infrequent. Hence, we present a novel strategy, named PSM-DMO, that minimizes the scan periods and thus, significantly reduces the overall energy consumption of the mesh network. PSM-DMO is defined as a new and optional feature for the currently published BLE mesh specifications, coexists with the standard operation, and is implemented without modifying the core of the specification. The proposal, that ensures the reliability of the mesh operation, can be used in BLE sensor networks that can tolerate a certain transmission delay. PSM-DMO replaces the continuous scan by a periodic but asynchronous polling process whereby the relay and sink nodes interrogate their neighbors about the existence of data to receive or to retransmit through the network. Nodes only go into scan mode during the period of time the mesh network will be involved in the transmission and dissemination. This period is estimated by the node which is the source of data, it is announced to its neighbors and it is propagated consecutively by all the relay nodes until the destination. PSM-DMO allows a theoretical reduction in the energy consumption of relay nodes up to 99.24 %.This work has been supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science through the projects RTI2018-099880-B-C32. RTI2018-095684-B-I00 and RTI2018-099063-B-I00 with ERFD funds, and by the Government of Aragon (Reference Group T31_20R).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

PSM-DMO: power save mode and discontinuous BLE mesh operation

The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) mesh profile, standardized by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), has an increasing interest in IoT solutions. However, the standard assumes that relay and friend nodes should be continuously scanning the channel awaiting any incoming transmissions. This could be very inefficient in terms of energy consumption, particularly in application scenarios where the backbone of the mesh network cannot be powered and traffic is infrequent. Hence, we present a novel strategy, named PSM-DMO, that minimizes the scan periods and thus, significantly reduces the overall energy consumption of the mesh network. PSM-DMO is defined as a new and optional feature for the currently published BLE mesh specifications, coexists with the standard operation, and is implemented without modifying the core of the specification. The proposal, that ensures the reliability of the mesh operation, can be used in BLE sensor networks that can tolerate a certain transmission delay. PSM-DMO replaces the continuous scan by a periodic but asynchronous polling process whereby the relay and sink nodes interrogate their neighbors about the existence of data to receive or to retransmit through the network. Nodes only go into scan mode during the period of time the mesh network will be involved in the transmission and dissemination. This period is estimated by the node which is the source of data, it is announced to its neighbors and it is propagated consecutively by all the relay nodes until the destination. PSM-DMO allows a theoretical reduction in the energy consumption of relay nodes up to 99.24 %