User Cooperation in Wireless Powered Communication Networks

This paper studies user cooperation in the emerging wireless powered communication network (WPCN) for throughput optimization. For the purpose of exposition, we consider a two-user WPCN, in which one hybrid access point (H-AP) broadcasts wireless energy to two distributed users in the downlink (DL) and the users transmit their independent information using their individually harvested energy to the H-AP in the uplink (UL) through time-division-multiple-access (TDMA). We propose user cooperation in the WPCN where the user which is nearer to the H-AP and has a better channel for DL energy harvesting and UL information transmission uses part of its allocated UL time and DL harvested energy to help to relay the far user's information to the H-AP, in order to achieve more balanced throughput optimization. We maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of the two users by jointly optimizing the time and power allocations in the network for both wireless energy transfer in the DL and wireless information transmission and relaying in the UL. Simulation results show that the proposed user cooperation scheme can effectively improve the achievable throughput in the WPCN with desired user fairness.Comment: 7 figure

Cost-Aware Green Cellular Networks with Energy and Communication Cooperation

Energy cost of cellular networks is ever-increasing to match the surge of wireless data traffic, and the saving of this cost is important to reduce the operational expenditure (OPEX) of wireless operators in future. The recent advancements of renewable energy integration and two-way energy flow in smart grid provide potential new solutions to save the cost. However, they also impose challenges, especially on how to use the stochastically and spatially distributed renewable energy harvested at cellular base stations (BSs) to reliably supply time- and space-varying wireless traffic over cellular networks. To overcome these challenges, in this article we present three approaches, namely, {\emph{energy cooperation, communication cooperation, and joint energy and communication cooperation}}, in which different BSs bidirectionally trade or share energy via the aggregator in smart grid, and/or share wireless resources and shift loads with each other to reduce the total energy cost.Comment: Submitted for possible publicatio

Outage Probability Analysis of Coded Cooperative Communication

Cooperative communication was proposed for wireless networks such as cellular network and wireless ad-hoc networks to meet the rapid increase in the data rate. Coded cooperative communication is one of the co-operative system, in which cooperation is combined with the channel coding. Coded cooperation is a promising technology to improve the outage performance of the system

Energy Efficiency of Network Cooperation for Cellular Uplink Transmissions

There is a growing interest in energy efficient or so-called "green" wireless communication to reduce the energy consumption in cellular networks. Since today's wireless terminals are typically equipped with multiple network access interfaces such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular networks, this paper investigates user terminals cooperating with each other in transmitting their data packets to a base station (BS) by exploiting the multiple network access interfaces, referred to as inter-network cooperation, to improve the energy efficiency in cellular uplink transmission. Given target outage probability and data rate requirements, we develop a closed-form expression of energy efficiency in Bits-per-Joule for the inter-network cooperation by taking into account the path loss, fading, and thermal noise effects. Numerical results show that when the cooperating users move towards to each other, the proposed inter-network cooperation significantly improves the energy efficiency as compared with the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation. This implies that given a certain amount of bits to be transmitted, the inter-network cooperation requires less energy than the traditional non-cooperation and intra-network cooperation, showing the energy saving benefit of inter-network cooperation.Comment: in Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Communications (IEEE ICC 2013), Budapest, Hungary, June 201