Performance Analysis, Resource Allocation and Optimization of Cooperative Communication Systems under Generalized Fading Channels

The increasing demands for high-speed data transmission, efficient wireless access, high quality of service (QoS) and reliable network coverage with reduced power consumption impose demanding intensive research efforts on the design of novel wireless communication system architectures. A notable development in the area of communication theory is the introduction of cooperative communication systems. These technologies become promising solution for the next-generation wireless transmission systems due to their applicability in size, power, hardware and price constrained devices, such as cellular mobile devices, wireless sensors, ad-hoc networks and military communications, being able to provide, e.g., diversity gain against fading channels without the need for installing multiple antennas in a single terminal. The performance of the cooperative systems can in general be significantly increased by allocating the limited power efficiently. In this thesis, we address in detail the performance analysis, resource allocation and optimization of such cooperative communication systems under generalized fading channels. We focus first on energy-efficiency (EE) optimization and optimal power allocation (OPA) of regenerative cooperative network with spatial correlation effects under given power constraint and QoS requirement. The thesis also investigates the end-to-end performance and power allocation of a regenerative multi-relay cooperative network over non-homogeneous scattering environment, which is realistic case in practical wireless communication scenarios. Furthermore, the study investigates the end-to-end performance, OPA and energy optimization analysis under total power constraint and performance requirement of full-duplex (FD) relaying transmission scheme over asymmetric generalized fading models with relay self-interference (SI) effects.The study first focuses on exact error analysis and EE optimization of regenerative relay systems under spatial correlation effects. It first derives novel exact and asymptotic expressions for the symbol-error-rates (SERs) of M -ary quadrature amplitude and M -ary phase-shift keying (M -QAM) and (M -PSK) modulations, respectively, assuming a dual-hop decode-and-forward relay system, spatial correlation, path-loss effects and maximum-ratio-combing (MRC) at the destination. Based on this, EEoptimization and OPA are carried out under certain QoS requirement and transmit power constraints.Furthermore, the second part of the study investigates the end-to-end performance and power allocation of MRC based regenerative multi-relay cooperative system over non-homogeneous scattering environment. Novel exact and asymptotic expressions are derived for the end-to-end average SER for M -QAM and M -PSK modulations.The offered results are employed in performance investigations and power allocation formulations under total transmit power constraints.Finally, the thesis investigates outage performance, OPA and energy optimization analysis under certain system constraints for the FD and half-duplex (HD) relaying systems. Unlike the previous studies that considered the scenario of information transmission over symmetric fading conditions, in this study we considered the scenario of information transmission over the most generalized asymmetric fading environments.The obtained results indicate that depending on the severity of multipath fading, the spatial correlation between the direct and relayed paths and the relay location, the direct transmission is more energy-efficient only for rather short transmission distances and until a certain threshold. Beyond this, the system benefits substantially from the cooperative transmission approach where the cooperation gain increases as the transmission distance increases. Furthermore, the investigations on the power allocation for the multi-relay system over the generalized small-scale fading model show that substantial performance gain can be achieved by the proposed power allocation scheme over the conventional equal power allocation (EPA) scheme when the source-relay and relay-destination paths are highly unbalanced. Extensive studies on the FD relay system also show that OPA provides significant performance gain over the EPA scheme when the relay SI level is relatively strong. In addition, it is shown that the FD relaying scheme is more energy-efficient than the reference HD relaying scheme at long transmission distances and for moderate relay SI levels.In general, the investigations in this thesis provide tools, results and useful insights for implementing space-efficient, low-cost and energy-efficient cooperative networks, specifically, towards the future green communication era where the optimization of the scarce resources is critical

Cross-Layer design and analysis of cooperative wireless networks relying on efficient coding techniques

2011/2012This thesis work aims at analysing the performance of efficient cooperative techniques and of smart antenna aided solutions in the context of wireless networks. Particularly, original contributions include a performance analysis of distributed coding techniques for the physical layer of communication systems, the design of practical efficient coding schemes that approach the analytic limiting bound, the cross-layer design of cooperative medium access control systems that incorporate and benefit from advanced physical layer techniques, the study of the performance of such solutions under realistic network assumptions, and, finally the design of access protocols where nodes are equipped with smart antenna systems.XXV Ciclo198

Scaling up virtual MIMO systems

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are a mature technology that has been incorporated into current wireless broadband standards to improve the channel capacity and link reliability. Nevertheless, due to the continuous increasing demand for wireless data traffic new strategies are to be adopted. Very large MIMO antenna arrays represents a paradigm shift in terms of theory and implementation, where the use of tens or hundreds of antennas provides significant improvements in throughput and radiated energy efficiency compared to single antennas setups. Since design constraints limit the number of usable antennas, virtual systems can be seen as a promising technique due to their ability to mimic and exploit the gains of multi-antenna systems by means of wireless cooperation. Considering these arguments, in this work, energy efficient coding and network design for large virtual MIMO systems are presented. Firstly, a cooperative virtual MIMO (V-MIMO) system that uses a large multi-antenna transmitter and implements compress-and-forward (CF) relay cooperation is investigated. Since constructing a reliable codebook is the most computationally complex task performed by the relay nodes in CF cooperation, reduced complexity quantisation techniques are introduced. The analysis is focused on the block error probability (BLER) and the computational complexity for the uniform scalar quantiser (U-SQ) and the Lloyd-Max algorithm (LM-SQ). Numerical results show that the LM-SQ is simpler to design and can achieve a BLER performance comparable to the optimal vector quantiser. Furthermore, due to its low complexity, U-SQ could be consider particularly suitable for very large wireless systems. Even though very large MIMO systems enhance the spectral efficiency of wireless networks, this comes at the expense of linearly increasing the power consumption due to the use of multiple radio frequency chains to support the antennas. Thus, the energy efficiency and throughput of the cooperative V-MIMO system are analysed and the impact of the imperfect channel state information (CSI) on the system’s performance is studied. Finally, a power allocation algorithm is implemented to reduce the total power consumption. Simulation results show that wireless cooperation between users is more energy efficient than using a high modulation order transmission and that the larger the number of transmit antennas the lower the impact of the imperfect CSI on the system’s performance. Finally, the application of cooperative systems is extended to wireless self-backhauling heterogeneous networks, where the decode-and-forward (DF) protocol is employed to provide a cost-effective and reliable backhaul. The associated trade-offs for a heterogeneous network with inhomogeneous user distributions are investigated through the use of sleeping strategies. Three different policies for switching-off base stations are considered: random, load-based and greedy algorithms. The probability of coverage for the random and load-based sleeping policies is derived. Moreover, an energy efficient base station deployment and operation approach is presented. Numerical results show that the average number of base stations required to support the traffic load at peak-time can be reduced by using the greedy algorithm for base station deployment and that highly clustered networks exhibit a smaller average serving distance and thus, a better probability of coverage

High capacity multiuser multiantenna communication techniques

One of the main issues involved in the development of future wireless communication systems is the multiple access technique used to efficiently share the available spectrum among users. In rich multipath environment, spatial dimension can be exploited to meet the increasing number of users and their demands without consuming extra bandwidth and power. Therefore, it is utilized in the multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology to increase the spectral efficiency significantly. However, multiuser MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems are still challenging to be widely adopted in next generation standards. In this thesis, new techniques are proposed to increase the channel and user capacity and improve the error performance of MU-MIMO over Rayleigh fading channel environment. For realistic system design and performance evaluation, channel correlation is considered as one of the main channel impurities due its severe influence on capacity and reliability. Two simple methods called generalized successive coloring technique (GSCT) and generalized iterative coloring technique (GICT) are proposed for accurate generation of correlated Rayleigh fading channels (CRFC). They are designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing methods by avoiding factorization of desired covariance matrix of the Gaussian samples. The superiority of these techniques is demonstrated by extensive simulations of different practical system scenarios. To mitigate the effects of channel correlations, a novel constellation constrained MU-MIMO (CC-MU-MIMO) scheme is proposed using transmit signal design and maximum likelihood joint detection (MLJD) at the receiver. It is designed to maximize the channel capacity and error performance based on principles of maximizing the minimum Euclidean distance (dmin) of composite received signals. Two signal design methods named as unequal power allocation (UPA) and rotation constellation (RC) are utilized to resolve the detection ambiguity caused by correlation. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of considered scheme compared with conventional MU-MIMO. Furthermore, significant gain in SNR is achieved particularly in moderate to high correlations which have direct impact to maintain high user capacity. A new efficient receive antenna selection (RAS) technique referred to as phase difference based selection (PDBS) is proposed for single and multiuser MIMO systems to maximize the capacity over CRFC. It utilizes the received signal constellation to select the subset of antennas with highest (dmin) constellations due to its direct impact on the capacity and BER performance. A low complexity algorithm is designed by employing the Euclidean norm of channel matrix rows with their corresponding phase differences. Capacity analysis and simulation results show that PDBS outperforms norm based selection (NBS) and near to optimal selection (OS) for all correlation and SNR values. This technique provides fast RAS to capture most of the gains promised by multiantenna systems over different channel conditions. Finally, novel group layered MU-MIMO (GL-MU-MIMO) scheme is introduced to exploit the available spectrum for higher user capacity with affordable complexity. It takes the advantages of spatial difference among users and power control at base station to increase the number of users beyond the available number of RF chains. It is achieved by dividing the users into two groups according to their received power, high power group (HPG) and low power group (LPG). Different configurations of low complexity group layered multiuser detection (GL-MUD) and group power allocation ratio (η) are utilized to provide a valuable tradeoff between complexity and overall system performance. Furthermore, RAS diversity is incorporated by using NBS and a new selection algorithm called HPG-PDBS to increase the channel capacity and enhance the error performance. Extensive analysis and simulations demonstrate the superiority of proposed scheme compared with conventional MU-MIMO. By using appropriate value of (η), it shows higher sum rate capacity and substantial increase in the user capacity up to two-fold at target BER and SNR values