Cooperative retransmission protocols in fading channels : issues, solutions and applications

Future wireless systems are expected to extensively rely on cooperation between terminals, mimicking MIMO scenarios when terminal dimensions limit implementation of multiple antenna technology. On this line, cooperative retransmission protocols are considered as particularly promising technology due to their opportunistic and flexible exploitation of both spatial and time diversity. In this dissertation, some of the major issues that hinder the practical implementation of this technology are identified and pertaining solutions are proposed and analyzed. Potentials of cooperative and cooperative retransmission protocols for a practical implementation of dynamic spectrum access paradigm are also recognized and investigated. Detailed contributions follow. While conventionally regarded as energy efficient communications paradigms, both cooperative and retransmission concepts increase circuitry energy and may lead to energy overconsumption as in, e.g., sensor networks. In this context, advantages of cooperative retransmission protocols are reexamined in this dissertation and their limitation for short transmission ranges observed. An optimization effort is provided for extending an energy- efficient applicability of these protocols. Underlying assumption of altruistic relaying has always been a major stumbling block for implementation of cooperative technologies. In this dissertation, provision is made to alleviate this assumption and opportunistic mechanisms are designed that incentivize relaying via a spectrum leasing approach. Mechanisms are provided for both cooperative and cooperative retransmission protocols, obtaining a meaningful upsurge of spectral efficiency for all involved nodes (source-destination link and the relays). It is further recognized in this dissertation that the proposed relaying-incentivizing schemes have an additional and certainly not less important application, that is in dynamic spectrum access for property-rights cognitive-radio implementation. Provided solutions avoid commons-model cognitive-radio strict sensing requirements and regulatory and taxonomy issues of a property-rights model

Joint relay selection and bandwidth allocation for cooperative relay network

Cooperative communication that exploits multiple relay links offers significant performance improvement in terms of coverage and capacity for mobile data subscribers in hierarchical cellular network. Since cooperative communication utilizes multiple relay links, complexity of the network is increased due to the needs for efficient resource allocation. Besides, usage of multiple relay links leads to Inter- Cell Interference (ICI). The main objective of this thesis is to develop efficient resource allocation scheme minimizes the effect of ICI in cooperative relay network. The work proposed a joint relay selection and bandwidth allocation in cooperative relay network that ensures high achievable data rate with high user satisfaction and low outage percentage. Two types of network models are considered: single cell network and multicell network. Joint Relay Selection and Bandwidth Allocation with Spatial Reuse (JReSBA_SR) and Optimized JReSBA_SR (O_JReSBA_SR) are developed for single cell network. JReSBA_SR considers link quality and user demand for resource allocation, and is equipped with spatial reuse to support higher network load. O_JReSBA_SR is an enhancement of JReSBA_SR with decision strategy based on Markov optimization. In multicell network, JReSBA with Interference Mitigation (JReSBA_IM) and Optimized JReSBA_IM (O_JReSBA_IM) are developed. JReSBA_IM deploys sectored-Fractional Frequency Reuse (sectored- FFR) partitioning concept in order to minimize the effect of ICI between adjacent cells. The performance is evaluated in terms of cell achievable rate, Outage Percentage (OP) and Satisfaction Index (SI). The result for single cell network shows that JReSBA_SR has notably improved the cell achievable rate by 35.0%, with reduced OP by 17.7% compared to non-joint scheme at the expense of slight increase in complexity at Relay Node (RN). O_JReSBA_SR has further improved the cell achievable rate by 13.9% while maintaining the outage performance with reduced complexity compared to JReSBA_SR due to the effect of optimization. The result for multicell network shows that JReSBA_IM enhances the cell achievable rate up to 65.1% and reduces OP by 35.0% as compared to benchmark scheme. Similarly, O_JReSBA_IM has significantly reduced the RN complexity of JReSBA_IM scheme, improved the cell achievable rate up to 9.3% and reduced OP by 1.3%. The proposed joint resource allocation has significantly enhanced the network performance through spatial frequency reuse, efficient, fair and optimized resource allocation. The proposed resource allocation is adaptable to variation of network load and can be used in any multihop cellular network such as Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) network