Forwarding strategies and optimal power allocation for coherent and noncoherent relay networks

In fading wireless channels, relays are used with the aim of achieving diversity and thus overall performance gain. In cooperative relay networks, various forwarding techniques like amplify and forward (AF) and decode and forward (DF) are used at the relay for better throughput and improved BER performance than traditional multihop systems. In a power constrained environment, the performance can be further improved by using an optimal power allocation strategy. The relative position of the relay with respect to the source and destination also has an immense effect on the efficacy of the relay.;We position the relay at various positions in a planar grid, with the position of source and destination being fixed, and we investigate the effect that the positioning of the relay has on a relaying system. We use our three terminal model to optimize the power allocation under total transmit power constraint, to maximize the instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at destination, and thus achieve improved throughput and BER performance, while using AF and DF protocols. We evaluate the performance of our system for both coherent and noncoherent modulation in a Rayleigh block fading channel. Quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) is used in the coherent case and 4-Frequency shift keying (4-FSK) is used in the noncoherent case.;Previous works involving power allocation schemes have mainly concentrated on optimizing information theoretic quantities like capacity and outage probability. We derive expressions for instantaneous SNR using our model and optimize the power allocation based on that, with the final aim of achieving improved uncoded BER. Analytical expressions of the instantaneous SNR at the destination are derived for both AF and DF. These expressions are numerically optimized to obtain an optimum power allocation strategy for each position of the relay in both the AF and DF schemes using coherent or noncoherent detection.;We compare the performance of the AF and DF protocols based on their positional BER and throughput at different received SNR and notice that our power optimized schemes outperform existing power control schemes at certain areas. Finally we also identify the shape and area of the regions where relaying would provide performance gains for both the protocols at different received SNRs

Filter-And-Forward Distributed Beamforming in Relay Networks with Frequency Selective Fading

A new approach to distributed cooperative beamforming in relay networks with frequency selective fading is proposed. It is assumed that all the relay nodes are equipped with finite impulse response (FIR) filters and use a filter-and-forward (FF) strategy to compensate for the transmitter-to-relay and relay-to-destination channels. Three relevant half-duplex distributed beamforming problems are considered. The first problem amounts to minimizing the total relay transmitted power subject to the destination quality-of-service (QoS) constraint. In the second and third problems, the destination QoS is maximized subject to the total and individual relay transmitted power constraints, respectively. For the first and second problems, closed-form solutions are obtained, whereas the third problem is solved using convex optimization. The latter convex optimization technique can be also directly extended to the case when the individual and total power constraints should be jointly taken into account. Simulation results demonstrate that in the frequency selective fading case, the proposed FF approach provides substantial performance improvements as compared to the commonly used amplify-and-forward (AF) relay beamforming strategy.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Signal Processing on 8 July 200

Enhancing Physical Layer Security in AF Relay Assisted Multi-Carrier Wireless Transmission

In this paper, we study the physical layer security (PLS) problem in the dual hop orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based wireless communication system. First, we consider a single user single relay system and study a joint power optimization problem at the source and relay subject to individual power constraint at the two nodes. The aim is to maximize the end to end secrecy rate with optimal power allocation over different sub-carriers. Later, we consider a more general multi-user multi-relay scenario. Under high SNR approximation for end to end secrecy rate, an optimization problem is formulated to jointly optimize power allocation at the BS, the relay selection, sub-carrier assignment to users and the power loading at each of the relaying node. The target is to maximize the overall security of the system subject to independent power budget limits at each transmitting node and the OFDMA based exclusive sub-carrier allocation constraints. A joint optimization solution is obtained through duality theory. Dual decomposition allows to exploit convex optimization techniques to find the power loading at the source and relay nodes. Further, an optimization for power loading at relaying nodes along with relay selection and sub carrier assignment for the fixed power allocation at the BS is also studied. Lastly, a sub-optimal scheme that explores joint power allocation at all transmitting nodes for the fixed subcarrier allocation and relay assignment is investigated. Finally, simulation results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed schemes.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, accepted in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies (ETT), formerly known as European Transactions on Telecommunications (ETT

Optimization Framework and Graph-Based Approach for Relay-Assisted Bidirectional OFDMA Cellular Networks

This paper considers a relay-assisted bidirectional cellular network where the base station (BS) communicates with each mobile station (MS) using OFDMA for both uplink and downlink. The goal is to improve the overall system performance by exploring the full potential of the network in various dimensions including user, subcarrier, relay, and bidirectional traffic. In this work, we first introduce a novel three-time-slot time-division duplexing (TDD) transmission protocol. This protocol unifies direct transmission, one-way relaying and network-coded two-way relaying between the BS and each MS. Using the proposed three-time-slot TDD protocol, we then propose an optimization framework for resource allocation to achieve the following gains: cooperative diversity (via relay selection), network coding gain (via bidirectional transmission mode selection), and multiuser diversity (via subcarrier assignment). We formulate the problem as a combinatorial optimization problem, which is NP-complete. To make it more tractable, we adopt a graph-based approach. We first establish the equivalence between the original problem and a maximum weighted clique problem in graph theory. A metaheuristic algorithm based on any colony optimization (ACO) is then employed to find the solution in polynomial time. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol together with the ACO algorithm significantly enhances the system total throughput.Comment: 27 pages, 8 figures, 2 table