Multicast Multigroup Precoding and User Scheduling for Frame-Based Satellite Communications

The present work focuses on the forward link of a broadband multibeam satellite system that aggressively reuses the user link frequency resources. Two fundamental practical challenges, namely the need to frame multiple users per transmission and the per-antenna transmit power limitations, are addressed. To this end, the so-called frame-based precoding problem is optimally solved using the principles of physical layer multicasting to multiple co-channel groups under per-antenna constraints. In this context, a novel optimization problem that aims at maximizing the system sum rate under individual power constraints is proposed. Added to that, the formulation is further extended to include availability constraints. As a result, the high gains of the sum rate optimal design are traded off to satisfy the stringent availability requirements of satellite systems. Moreover, the throughput maximization with a granular spectral efficiency versus SINR function, is formulated and solved. Finally, a multicast-aware user scheduling policy, based on the channel state information, is developed. Thus, substantial multiuser diversity gains are gleaned. Numerical results over a realistic simulation environment exhibit as much as 30% gains over conventional systems, even for 7 users per frame, without modifying the framing structure of legacy communication standards.Comment: Accepted for publication to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, 201

Precoder Design for Physical Layer Multicasting

This paper studies the instantaneous rate maximization and the weighted sum delay minimization problems over a K-user multicast channel, where multiple antennas are available at the transmitter as well as at all the receivers. Motivated by the degree of freedom optimality and the simplicity offered by linear precoding schemes, we consider the design of linear precoders using the aforementioned two criteria. We first consider the scenario wherein the linear precoder can be any complex-valued matrix subject to rank and power constraints. We propose cyclic alternating ascent based precoder design algorithms and establish their convergence to respective stationary points. Simulation results reveal that our proposed algorithms considerably outperform known competing solutions. We then consider a scenario in which the linear precoder can be formed by selecting and concatenating precoders from a given finite codebook of precoding matrices, subject to rank and power constraints. We show that under this scenario, the instantaneous rate maximization problem is equivalent to a robust submodular maximization problem which is strongly NP hard. We propose a deterministic approximation algorithm and show that it yields a bicriteria approximation. For the weighted sum delay minimization problem we propose a simple deterministic greedy algorithm, which at each step entails approximately maximizing a submodular set function subject to multiple knapsack constraints, and establish its performance guarantee.Comment: 37 pages, 8 figures, submitted to IEEE Trans. Signal Pro

Block-Diagonal and LT Codes for Distributed Computing With Straggling Servers

We propose two coded schemes for the distributed computing problem of multiplying a matrix by a set of vectors. The first scheme is based on partitioning the matrix into submatrices and applying maximum distance separable (MDS) codes to each submatrix. For this scheme, we prove that up to a given number of partitions the communication load and the computational delay (not including the encoding and decoding delay) are identical to those of the scheme recently proposed by Li et al., based on a single, long MDS code. However, due to the use of shorter MDS codes, our scheme yields a significantly lower overall computational delay when the delay incurred by encoding and decoding is also considered. We further propose a second coded scheme based on Luby Transform (LT) codes under inactivation decoding. Interestingly, LT codes may reduce the delay over the partitioned scheme at the expense of an increased communication load. We also consider distributed computing under a deadline and show numerically that the proposed schemes outperform other schemes in the literature, with the LT code-based scheme yielding the best performance for the scenarios considered.Comment: To appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Robust transceiver designs for MIMO relay communication systems

The thesis investigates robust linear and non-linear transceiver design problems for wireless MIMO relay communication systems with the assumption that the partial information of the channel is available at the relay node. The joint source and relay optimization problems for MIMO relay systems are highly nonconvex, in general. We transform the problems into suitable forms which can be efficiently solved using standard convex optimization techniques. The proposed design schemes outperform the existing techniques