Distributed MAC Protocol Supporting Physical-Layer Network Coding

Physical-layer network coding (PNC) is a promising approach for wireless networks. It allows nodes to transmit simultaneously. Due to the difficulties of scheduling simultaneous transmissions, existing works on PNC are based on simplified medium access control (MAC) protocols, which are not applicable to general multi-hop wireless networks, to the best of our knowledge. In this paper, we propose a distributed MAC protocol that supports PNC in multi-hop wireless networks. The proposed MAC protocol is based on the carrier sense multiple access (CSMA) strategy and can be regarded as an extension to the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. In the proposed protocol, each node collects information on the queue status of its neighboring nodes. When a node finds that there is an opportunity for some of its neighbors to perform PNC, it notifies its corresponding neighboring nodes and initiates the process of packet exchange using PNC, with the node itself as a relay. During the packet exchange process, the relay also works as a coordinator which coordinates the transmission of source nodes. Meanwhile, the proposed protocol is compatible with conventional network coding and conventional transmission schemes. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is advantageous in various scenarios of wireless applications.Comment: Final versio

Distributed Detection and Estimation in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this article we consider the problems of distributed detection and estimation in wireless sensor networks. In the first part, we provide a general framework aimed to show how an efficient design of a sensor network requires a joint organization of in-network processing and communication. Then, we recall the basic features of consensus algorithm, which is a basic tool to reach globally optimal decisions through a distributed approach. The main part of the paper starts addressing the distributed estimation problem. We show first an entirely decentralized approach, where observations and estimations are performed without the intervention of a fusion center. Then, we consider the case where the estimation is performed at a fusion center, showing how to allocate quantization bits and transmit powers in the links between the nodes and the fusion center, in order to accommodate the requirement on the maximum estimation variance, under a constraint on the global transmit power. We extend the approach to the detection problem. Also in this case, we consider the distributed approach, where every node can achieve a globally optimal decision, and the case where the decision is taken at a central node. In the latter case, we show how to allocate coding bits and transmit power in order to maximize the detection probability, under constraints on the false alarm rate and the global transmit power. Then, we generalize consensus algorithms illustrating a distributed procedure that converges to the projection of the observation vector onto a signal subspace. We then address the issue of energy consumption in sensor networks, thus showing how to optimize the network topology in order to minimize the energy necessary to achieve a global consensus. Finally, we address the problem of matching the topology of the network to the graph describing the statistical dependencies among the observed variables.Comment: 92 pages, 24 figures. To appear in E-Reference Signal Processing, R. Chellapa and S. Theodoridis, Eds., Elsevier, 201

Wireless MIMO Switching: Weighted Sum Mean Square Error and Sum Rate Optimization

This paper addresses joint transceiver and relay design for a wireless multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) switching scheme that enables data exchange among multiple users. Here, a multi-antenna relay linearly precodes the received (uplink) signals from multiple users before forwarding the signal in the downlink, where the purpose of precoding is to let each user receive its desired signal with interference from other users suppressed. The problem of optimizing the precoder based on various design criteria is typically non-convex and difficult to solve. The main contribution of this paper is a unified approach to solve the weighted sum mean square error (MSE) minimization and weighted sum rate maximization problems in MIMO switching. Specifically, an iterative algorithm is proposed for jointly optimizing the relay's precoder and the users' receive filters to minimize the weighted sum MSE. It is also shown that the weighted sum rate maximization problem can be reformulated as an iterated weighted sum MSE minimization problem and can therefore be solved similarly to the case of weighted sum MSE minimization. With properly chosen initial values, the proposed iterative algorithms are asymptotically optimal in both high and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regimes for MIMO switching, either with or without self-interference cancellation (a.k.a., physical-layer network coding). Numerical results show that the optimized MIMO switching scheme based on the proposed algorithms significantly outperforms existing approaches in the literature.Comment: This manuscript is under 2nd review of IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Linear Precoders for Non-Regenerative Asymmetric Two-way Relaying in Cellular Systems

Two-way relaying (TWR) reduces the spectral-efficiency loss caused in conventional half-duplex relaying. TWR is possible when two nodes exchange data simultaneously through a relay. In cellular systems, data exchange between base station (BS) and users is usually not simultaneous e.g., a user (TUE) has uplink data to transmit during multiple access (MAC) phase, but does not have downlink data to receive during broadcast (BC) phase. This non-simultaneous data exchange will reduce TWR to spectrally-inefficient conventional half-duplex relaying. With infrastructure relays, where multiple users communicate through a relay, a new transmission protocol is proposed to recover the spectral loss. The BC phase following the MAC phase of TUE is now used by the relay to transmit downlink data to another user (RUE). RUE will not be able to cancel the back-propagating interference. A structured precoder is designed at the multi-antenna relay to cancel this interference. With multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nodes, the proposed precoder also triangulates the compound MAC and BC phase MIMO channels. The channel triangulation reduces the weighted sum-rate optimization to power allocation problem, which is then cast as a geometric program. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol over conventional solutions.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication