On Capacity of Active Relaying in Magnetic Induction based Wireless Underground Sensor Networks

Wireless underground sensor networks (WUSNs) present a variety of new research challenges. Magnetic induction (MI) based transmission has been proposed to overcome the very harsh propagation conditions in underground communications in recent years. In this approach, induction coils are utilized as antennas in the sensor nodes. This solution achieves longer transmission ranges compared to the traditional electromagnetic (EM) waves based approach. Furthermore, a passive relaying technique has been proposed in the literature where additional resonant circuits are deployed between the nodes. However, this solution is shown to provide only a limited performance improvement under practical system design contraints. In this work, the potential of an active relay device is investigated which may improve the performance of the system by combining the benefits of the traditional wireless relaying and the MI based signal transmission.Comment: This paper has been accepted for presentation at IEEE ICC 2015. It has 6 pages, 5 figures (4 colored), and 17 reference

Hardware Impairments Aware Transceiver Design for Full-Duplex Amplify-and-Forward MIMO Relaying

In this work we study the behavior of a full-duplex (FD) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relay with multiple antennas, where hardware impairments of the FD relay transceiver is taken into account. Due to the inter-dependency of the transmit relay power on each antenna and the residual self-interference in an FD-AF relay, we observe a distortion loop that degrades the system performance when the relay dynamic range is not high. In this regard, we analyze the relay function in presence of the hardware inaccuracies and an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the signal to distortion-plus-noise ratio (SDNR), under relay and source transmit power constraints. Due to the problem complexity, we propose a gradient-projection-based (GP) algorithm to obtain an optimal solution. Moreover, a nonalternating sub-optimal solution is proposed by assuming a rank-1 relay amplification matrix, and separating the design of the relay process into multiple stages (MuStR1). The proposed MuStR1 method is then enhanced by introducing an alternating update over the optimization variables, denoted as AltMuStR1 algorithm. It is observed that compared to GP, (Alt)MuStR1 algorithms significantly reduce the required computational complexity at the expense of a slight performance degradation. Finally, the proposed methods are evaluated under various system conditions, and compared with the methods available in the current literature. In particular, it is observed that as the hardware impairments increase, or for a system with a high transmit power, the impact of applying a distortion-aware design is significant.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication