Video transmission over a relay channel with a compress-forward code design

There is an increasing demand to support high data rate multimedia applications over the current day wireless networks which are highly prone to errors. Relay channels, by virtue of their spatial diversity, play a vital role in meeting this demand without much change to the current day systems. A compress-forward relaying scheme is one of the exciting prospects in this regard owing to its ability to always outperform direct transmission. With regards to video transmission, there is a serious need to ensure higher protection for the source bits that are more important and sensitive. The objective of this thesis is to develop a practical scheme for transmitting video data over a relay channel using a compress-forward relaying scheme and compare it to direct and multi-hop transmissions. We also develop a novel scheme whereby the relay channel can be used as a means to provide the required unequal error protection among the MPEG-2 bit stream. The area of compress-forward (CF) relaying has not been developed much to date, with most of the research directed towards the decode-forward scheme. The fact that compress-forward relaying always ensures better results than direct transmission is an added advantage. This has motivated us to employ CF relaying in our implementation. Video transmission and streaming applications are being increasingly sought after in the current generation wireless systems. The fact that video applications are bandwidth demanding and error prone, and the wireless systems are band-limited and unreliable, makes this a challenging task. CF relaying, by virtue of their path diversity, can be considered to be a new means for video transmission. To exploit the above advantages, we propose an implementation for video transmission over relay channels using a CF relaying scheme. Practical gains in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) have been observed for our implementation compared to the simple binary-input additive white Gaussian noise (BIAWGN) and two-hop transmission scenarios

On Universal Properties of Capacity-Approaching LDPC Ensembles

This paper is focused on the derivation of some universal properties of capacity-approaching low-density parity-check (LDPC) code ensembles whose transmission takes place over memoryless binary-input output-symmetric (MBIOS) channels. Properties of the degree distributions, graphical complexity and the number of fundamental cycles in the bipartite graphs are considered via the derivation of information-theoretic bounds. These bounds are expressed in terms of the target block/ bit error probability and the gap (in rate) to capacity. Most of the bounds are general for any decoding algorithm, and some others are proved under belief propagation (BP) decoding. Proving these bounds under a certain decoding algorithm, validates them automatically also under any sub-optimal decoding algorithm. A proper modification of these bounds makes them universal for the set of all MBIOS channels which exhibit a given capacity. Bounds on the degree distributions and graphical complexity apply to finite-length LDPC codes and to the asymptotic case of an infinite block length. The bounds are compared with capacity-approaching LDPC code ensembles under BP decoding, and they are shown to be informative and are easy to calculate. Finally, some interesting open problems are considered.Comment: Published in the IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 2956 - 2990, July 200

Polar Coding Schemes for Cooperative Transmission Systems

: In this thesis, a serially-concatenated coding scheme with a polar code as the outer code and a low density generator matrix (LDGM) code as the inner code is firstly proposed. It is shown that that the proposed scheme provides a method to improve significantly the low convergence of polar codes and the high error floor of LDGM codes while keeping the advantages of both such as the low encoding and decoding complexity. The bit error rate results show that the proposed scheme by reasonable design have the potential to approach a performance close to the capacity limit and avoid error floor effectively. Secondly, a novel transmission protocol based on polar coding is proposed for the degraded half-duplex relay channel. In the proposed protocol, the relay only needs to forward a part of the decoded source message that the destination needs according to the exquisite nested structure of polar codes. It is proved that the scheme can achieve the capacity of the half-duplex relay channel while enjoying low encoding/decoding complexity. By modeling the practical system, we verify that the proposed scheme outperforms the conventional scheme designed by low-density parity-check codes by simulations. Finally, a generalized partial information relaying protocol is proposed for degraded multiple-relay networks with orthogonal receiver components (MRN-ORCs). In such a protocol, each relay node decodes the received source message with the help of partial information from previous nodes and re-encodes part of the decoded message for transmission to satisfy the decoding requirements for the following relay node or the destination node. For the design of polar codes, the nested structures are constructed based on this protocol and the information sets corresponding to the partial messages forwarded are also calculated. It is proved that the proposed scheme achieves the theoretical capacity of the degraded MRN-ORCs while still retains the low-complexity feature of polar codes

Maxflow-Based Bounds for Low-Rate Information Propagation over Noisy Networks

We study error exponents for the problem of low-rate communication over a directed graph, where each edge in the graph represents a noisy communication channel, and there is a single source and destination. We derive maxflow-based achievability and converse bounds on the error exponent that match when there are two messages and all channels satisfy a symmetry condition called pairwise reversibility. More generally, we show that the upper and lower bounds match to within a factor of 4. We also show that with three messages there are cases where the maxflow-based error exponent is strictly suboptimal, thus showing that our tightness result cannot be extended beyond two messages without further assumptions

Cooperative Punctured Polar Coding (CPPC) Scheme Based on Plotkin’s Construction

A new cooperative punctured polar coding (CPPC) scheme with multi joint successive cancellation (MJSC) decoding at the destination is proposed, which may be obtained by applying puncturing algorithm to cooperative polar coding scenario. In this proposed algorithm we generate a cooperative scheme for punctured polar codes with various code lengths by employing the reduction of the general polarizing matrix combined with the cooperative construction to match the multilevel characteristics of polar codes. Punctured polar codes which are a class of polar codes can support a wide range of lengths for a given rate. Hence in our CPPC scheme, the punctured polar codes can be first constructed by eliminating some of the frozen bits such that the values of the punctured bits are known to the decoder. Then the proposed coded cooperative construction is employed to match the Plotkin’s construction between the two relay nodes. This scheme has low encoding and decoding complexity since it can be encoded and decoded in a similar way as a classical polar code. The CPPC scheme offers a cooperative coding which not only improves the data rate of the cooperative system, but also improves the overall bit error rate performance. Numerical results show that cooperative punctured polar codes constructed by our approach perform much better than those by the conventional direct approach