A Simple Cooperative Diversity Method Based on Network Path Selection

Cooperative diversity has been recently proposed as a way to form virtual antenna arrays that provide dramatic gains in slow fading wireless environments. However most of the proposed solutions require distributed space-time coding algorithms, the careful design of which is left for future investigation if there is more than one cooperative relay. We propose a novel scheme, that alleviates these problems and provides diversity gains on the order of the number of relays in the network. Our scheme first selects the best relay from a set of M available relays and then uses this best relay for cooperation between the source and the destination. We develop and analyze a distributed method to select the best relay that requires no topology information and is based on local measurements of the instantaneous channel conditions. This method also requires no explicit communication among the relays. The success (or failure) to select the best available path depends on the statistics of the wireless channel, and a methodology to evaluate performance for any kind of wireless channel statistics, is provided. Information theoretic analysis of outage probability shows that our scheme achieves the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff as achieved by more complex protocols, where coordination and distributed space-time coding for M nodes is required, such as those proposed in [7]. The simplicity of the technique, allows for immediate implementation in existing radio hardware and its adoption could provide for improved flexibility, reliability and efficiency in future 4G wireless systems.Comment: To appear, IEEE JSAC, special issue on 4

Wireless Virtual Multiple Antenna Networks for Critical Process Control: Protocol Design and Experiments:

Wireless telemetry systems for remote monitoring and control of industrial processes are now becoming a relevant topic in the field of networked control. Wireless closed-loop control systems have stricter delay and link reliability requirements compared to conventional sensor networks for open-loop monitoring and call for the development of advanced network architectures. By following the guidelines introduced by recent standardization, this paper focuses on the most recent technological advances to enable wireless networked control for tight closed-loop applications with cycle times below 100 ms. The cooperative network paradigm is indicated as the key technology to enable cable replacing even in critical control applications. A cooperative communication system enables wireless devices placed at geographically separated locations to act as a virtual ensemble of antennas that creates a virtual multiple-antenna-distributed system. A proprietary link-layer protocol/based on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical layer has been developed and tested in an indoor environment characterized by non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation and dense obstacles. The measurements obtained from the testbed evaluate experimentally the benefits (and the limitations) of cable replacing in critical process control

RECOMAC: a cross-layer cooperative network protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

A novel decentralized cross-layer multi-hop cooperative protocol, namely, Routing Enabled Cooperative Medium Access Control (RECOMAC) is proposed for wireless ad hoc networks. The protocol architecture makes use of cooperative forwarding methods, in which coded packets are forwarded via opportunistically formed cooperative sets within a region, as RECOMAC spans the physical, medium access control (MAC) and routing layers. Randomized coding is exploited at the physical layer to realize cooperative transmissions, and cooperative forwarding is implemented for routing functionality, which is submerged into the MAC layer, while the overhead for MAC and route set up is minimized. RECOMAC is shown to provide dramatic performance improvements of eight times higher throughput and one tenth of end-to-end delay than that of the conventional architecture in practical wireless mesh networks

Hybrid turbo FEC/ARQ systems and distributed space-time coding for cooperative transmission

Cooperative transmission can be seen as a "virtual" MIMO system, where the multiple transmit antennas are in fact implemented distributed by the antennas both at the source and the relay terminal. Depending on the system design, diversity/multiplexing gains are achievable. This design involves the definition of the type of retransmission (incremental redundancy, repetition coding), the design of the distributed space-time codes, the error correcting scheme, the operation of the relay (decode&forward or amplify&forward) and the number of antennas at each terminal. Proposed schemes are evaluated in different conditions in combination with forward error correcting codes (FEC), both for linear and near-optimum (sphere decoder) receivers, for its possible implementation in downlink high speed packet services of cellular networks. Results show the benefits of coded cooperation over direct transmission in terms of increased throughput. It is shown that multiplexing gains are observed even if the mobile station features a single antenna, provided that cell wide reuse of the relay radio resource is possible