Distributed space-time block codes for two-hop wireless relay networks

Recently, the idea of space-time coding has been applied to wireless relay networks wherein a set of geographically separated relay nodes cooperate to process the received signal from the source and forward them to the destination such that the signal received at the destination appears like a Space-Time Block Code (STBC). Such STBCs (referred to as Distributed Space-Time Block Codes (DSTBCs)) when appropriately designed are known to offer spatial diversity. It is known that different classes of DSTBCs can be designed primarily depending on (i) whether the Amplify and Forward (AF) protocol or the Decode and Forward (DF) protocol is employed at the relays and (ii) whether the relay nodes are synchronized or not. In this paper, we present a survey on the problems and results associated with the design of DSTBCs for the following classes of two-hop wireless relay networks: (i) synchronous relay networks with AF protocols, (ii) asynchronous relay networks with AF protocols (iii) synchronous relay networks with DF protocols and (iv) asynchronous relay Fig. 1. Co-located MIMO channel model networks with DF protocols

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Communication over Asynchronous Networks: Signaling and Rate-Reliability Analysis

Asynchronism inherently exists in many communication systems specially in multi-terminal networks mainly due to the effect of multi-path and propagation delay. While in theoretical analysis of communication systems perfect synchronization of the terminals is often presumed, in some cases in which the nodes are randomly distributed over a geometrical area, it might be impossible to synchronize the nodes even if an ideal infrastructure service provider is used. In this work, two major categories of multi-user communication systems, i.e., relay networks and interference channels, are considered and the effect of the asynchronism among the terminals on characteristic properties of these channels are investigated. In Chapter 2, the construction of distributed space-time codes for a general two-hop asynchronous cooperative relay network is considered. A novel algebraic structure is proposed and shown to achieve full diversity for arbitrary number of relays, arbitrary input alphabets, and arbitrary delay profiles among the relays. Unlike previously proposed delay tolerant schemes, the new design has minimum length which translates into smaller decoding complexity at the same transmission rate. Full-rate and full-diversity are achieved by the new designs with or without the use of guard intervals between successive transmissions. Simulation results confirm the mathematical analysis of the proposed codes. In Chapter 3, the underlying asynchronous network is examined for various relaying protocols such as non-orthogonal selection decode-and-forward, orthogonal selection decode-and-forward, non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward (NAF), and orthogonal amplify-and-forward (OAF). The transmitter nodes send pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) signals, in which information symbols are linearly modulated by a shaping waveform to be sent to the destination, asynchronously. We consider two different cases with respect to the type of the shaping waveforms used in the structure of the PAM signals. In the theoretical case where band-limited shaping waveforms are used, it is shown that the asynchronism does not affect the DMT performance of the system and the same DMT as that of the corresponding synchronous network is obtained for all the aforementioned protocols. In the practical case where time-limited shaping waveforms are used, it is shown that better diversity gains can be achieved at the expense of a bandwidth expansion. More precisely, in the decode-and-forward type protocols, the asynchronous network provides a better diversity gain than that of the corresponding synchronous network throughout the range of the multiplexing gain. In the amplify-and-forward type protocols, the asynchronous network provides the same DMT as that of the corresponding synchronous counterpart under the OAF protocol; however, a better diversity gain is achieved under the NAF protocol throughout the range of the multiplexing gain. In particular, in the single relay asynchronous network, the NAF protocol provides the same DMT as that of the 2 × 1 multiple-input single-output channel. In Chapter 4, a constant K-user interference channel in which the users are not symbol synchronous is considered. It is shown that the asynchronism among the users does not affect the total number of degrees of freedom (DOF) of this channel; however, it facilitates aligning interfering signals at each receiver node. To achieve the total K/2 DOF of this channel when single antenna nodes are used, a novel practical interference alignment scheme is proposed wherein the alignment task is performed with the help of asynchronous delays which inherently exist among the received signals at each receiver node. The asynchronism causes inter-symbol-interference (ISI) among transmitted symbols by different transmitters resulting in the underlying quasi-static links to be converted to ISI and accordingly into time varying channels. It is proved that this conversion solves the lack of channel variation required for the interference alignment in quasi-static scenarios. When each node is equipped with M > 1 antennas, it is argued that the same alignment scheme proposed for the single antenna nodes’ interference channel is sufficient to achieve the total MK/2 DOF of the medium provided that each pair of the transmitters and the receivers experience the same asynchronous delay for all the corresponding antennas. In contrast to previously proposed alignment schemes, the channel state information of the links does not need to be known at the transmitter nodes. Instead, the relative delays among the received signals at each receiver node are globally known to the entire network. While the asynchronism is usually treated as a troublesome factor in communication systems, in this dissertation, we are interested to introduce it as a useful property of the wireless medium similar to the fading which can improve the system performance in some communication scenarios or facilitate signaling over the medium in some other scenarios

Coordinated Multicasting with Opportunistic User Selection in Multicell Wireless Systems

Physical layer multicasting with opportunistic user selection (OUS) is examined for multicell multi-antenna wireless systems. By adopting a two-layer encoding scheme, a rate-adaptive channel code is applied in each fading block to enable successful decoding by a chosen subset of users (which varies over different blocks) and an application layer erasure code is employed across multiple blocks to ensure that every user is able to recover the message after decoding successfully in a sufficient number of blocks. The transmit signal and code-rate in each block determine opportunistically the subset of users that are able to successfully decode and can be chosen to maximize the long-term multicast efficiency. The employment of OUS not only helps avoid rate-limitations caused by the user with the worst channel, but also helps coordinate interference among different cells and multicast groups. In this work, efficient algorithms are proposed for the design of the transmit covariance matrices, the physical layer code-rates, and the target user subsets in each block. In the single group scenario, the system parameters are determined by maximizing the group-rate, defined as the physical layer code-rate times the fraction of users that can successfully decode in each block. In the multi-group scenario, the system parameters are determined by considering a group-rate balancing optimization problem, which is solved by a successive convex approximation (SCA) approach. To further reduce the feedback overhead, we also consider the case where only part of the users feed back their channel vectors in each block and propose a design based on the balancing of the expected group-rates. In addition to SCA, a sample average approximation technique is also introduced to handle the probabilistic terms arising in this problem. The effectiveness of the proposed schemes is demonstrated by computer simulations.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Signal Processin

Distributed space-time coding including the golden code with application in cooperative networks

This thesis presents new methodologies to improve performance of wireless cooperative networks using the Golden Code. As a form of space-time coding, the Golden Code can achieve diversity-multiplexing tradeoff and the data rate can be twice that of the Alamouti code. In practice, however, asynchronism between relay nodes may reduce performance and channel quality can be degraded from certain antennas. Firstly, a simple offset transmission scheme, which employs full interference cancellation (FIC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), is enhanced through the use of four relay nodes and receiver processing to mitigate asynchronism. Then, the potential reduction in diversity gain due to the dependent channel matrix elements in the distributed Golden Code transmission, and the rate penalty of multihop transmission, are mitigated by relay selection based on two-way transmission. The Golden Code is also implemented in an asynchronous one-way relay network over frequency flat and selective channels, and a simple approach to overcome asynchronism is proposed. In one-way communication with computationally efficient sphere decoding, the maximum of the channel parameter means is shown to achieve the best performance for the relay selection through bit error rate simulations. Secondly, to reduce the cost of hardware when multiple antennas are available in a cooperative network, multi-antenna selection is exploited. In this context, maximum-sum transmit antenna selection is proposed. End-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is calculated and outage probability analysis is performed when the links are modelled as Rayleigh fading frequency flat channels. The numerical results support the analysis and for a MIMO system maximum-sum selection is shown to outperform maximum-minimum selection. Additionally, pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis is performed for maximum-sum transmit antenna selection with the Golden Code and the diversity order is obtained. Finally, with the assumption of fibre-connected multiple antennas with finite buffers, multiple-antenna selection is implemented on the basis of maximum-sum antenna selection. Frequency flat Rayleigh fading channels are assumed together with a decode and forward transmission scheme. Outage probability analysis is performed by exploiting the steady-state stationarity of a Markov Chain model

Radio Resource Management for New Application Scenarios in 5G: Optimization and Deep Learning

The fifth-generation (5G) New Radio (NR) systems are expected to support a wide range of emerging applications with diverse Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. New application scenarios in 5G NR include enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), massive machine-type communication (mMTC), and ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC). New wireless architectures, such as full-dimension (FD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) and mobile edge computing (MEC) system, and new coding scheme, such as short block-length channel coding, are envisioned as enablers of QoS requirements for 5G NR applications. Resource management in these new wireless architectures is crucial in guaranteeing the QoS requirements of 5G NR systems. The traditional optimization problems, such as subcarriers and user association, are usually non-convex or Non-deterministic Polynomial-time (NP)-hard. It is time-consuming and computing-expensive to find the optimal solution, especially in a large-scale network. To solve these problems, one approach is to design a low-complexity algorithm with near optimal performance. In some cases, the low complexity algorithms are hard to obtain, deep learning can be used as an accurate approximator that maps environment parameters, such as the channel state information and traffic state, to the optimal solutions. In this thesis, we design low-complexity optimization algorithms, and deep learning frameworks in different architectures of 5G NR to resolve optimization problems subject to QoS requirements. First, we propose a low-complexity algorithm for a joint cooperative beamforming and user association problem for eMBB in 5G NR to maximize the network capacity. Next, we propose a deep learning (DL) framework to optimize user association, resource allocation, and offloading probabilities for delay-tolerant services and URLLC in 5G NR. Finally, we address the issue of time-varying traffic and network conditions on resource management in 5G NR

Distributed Space-Time Coding Techniques with Limited Feedback in Cooperative MIMO Networks

DSTC designs with high diversity and coding gains and efficient detection and code matrices optimization algorithms in cooperative MIMO networks are proposed in this thesis. Firstly, adaptive power allocation (PA) algorithms with different criteria for a cooperative MIMO system equipped with DSTC schemes are proposed and evaluated. Linear receive filter and maximum likelihood (ML) detection are considered with amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) cooperation strategies. In the proposed algorithms, the elements in the PA matrices are optimized at the destination node and then transmitted back to the relay nodes via a feedback channel. Linear minimum mean square error (MMSE) receive filter expressions and the PA matrices depend on each other and are updated iteratively. Stochastic gradient (SG) algorithms are developed with reduced detection complexity. Secondly, an DSTC scheme is proposed for two-hop cooperative MIMO networks. An adjustable code matrix obtained by a feedback channel is employed to transform the space-time coded matrix at the relay node. The effects of the limited feedback and the feedback errors are assessed. An upper bound on the pairwise error probability analysis is derived and indicates the advantage of employing the adjustable code matrices at the relay nodes. An alternative optimization algorithm for the adaptive DSTC scheme is also derived in order to eliminate the need for feedback. Thirdly, an adaptive delay-tolerant DSTC (DT-DSTC) scheme is proposed for two-hop cooperative MIMO networks. An ML receiver and adjustable code matrices are considered for different DSTC configuration schemes subject to a power constraint with a DF cooperation strategy. An upper bound on the pairwise error probability and rank criteria analysis are derived and indicates the advantage of the proposed coding algorithm. Adaptive DT-DSTC algorithms are extended to the cooperative MIMO systems using an AF strategy and opportunistic relaying algorithms in order to achieve a delay-tolerant coding scheme combined with the optimal power allocation strategies

Distributed Quasi-Orthogonal Space-Time coding in wireless cooperative relay networks

Cooperative diversity provides a new paradigm in robust wireless re- lay networks that leverages Space-Time (ST) processing techniques to combat the effects of fading. Distributing the encoding over multiple relays that potentially observe uncorrelated channels to a destination terminal has demonstrated promising results in extending range, data- rates and transmit power utilization. Specifically, Space Time Block Codes (STBCs) based on orthogonal designs have proven extremely popular at exploiting spatial diversity through simple distributed pro- cessing without channel knowledge at the relaying terminals. This thesis aims at extending further the extensive design and analysis in relay networks based on orthogonal designs in the context of Quasi- Orthogonal Space Time Block Codes (QOSTBCs). The characterization of Quasi-Orthogonal MIMO channels for cooper- ative networks is performed under Ergodic and Non-Ergodic channel conditions. Specific to cooperative diversity, the sub-channels are as- sumed to observe different shadowing conditions as opposed to the traditional co-located communication system. Under Ergodic chan- nel assumptions novel closed-form solutions for cooperative channel capacity under the constraint of distributed-QOSTBC processing are presented. This analysis is extended to yield closed-form approx- imate expressions and their utility is verified through simulations. The effective use of partial feedback to orthogonalize the QOSTBC is examined and significant gains under specific channel conditions are demonstrated. Distributed systems cooperating over the network introduce chal- lenges in synchronization. Without extensive network management it is difficult to synchronize all the nodes participating in the relaying between source and destination terminals. Based on QOSTBC tech- niques simple encoding strategies are introduced that provide compa- rable throughput to schemes under synchronous conditions with neg- ligible overhead in processing throughout the protocol. Both mutli- carrier and single-carrier schemes are developed to enable the flexi- bility to limit Peak-to-Average-Power-Ratio (PAPR) and reduce the Radio Frequency (RF) requirements of the relaying terminals. The insights gained in asynchronous design in flat-fading cooperative channels are then extended to broadband networks over frequency- selective channels where the novel application of QOSTBCs are used in distributed-Space-Time-Frequency (STF) coding. Specifically, cod- ing schemes are presented that extract both spatial and mutli-path diversity offered by the cooperative Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) channel. To provide maximum flexibility the proposed schemes are adapted to facilitate both Decode-and-Forward (DF) and Amplify- and-Forward (AF) relaying. In-depth Pairwise-Error-Probability (PEP) analysis provides distinct design specifications which tailor the distributed- STF code to maximize the diversity and coding gain offered under the DF and AF protocols. Numerical simulation are used extensively to confirm the validity of the proposed cooperative schemes. The analytical and numerical re- sults demonstrate the effective use of QOSTBC over orthogonal tech- niques in a wide range of channel conditions