Resource allocation and optimization techniques in wireless relay networks

Relay techniques have the potential to enhance capacity and coverage of a wireless network. Due to rapidly increasing number of smart phone subscribers and high demand for data intensive multimedia applications, the useful radio spectrum is becoming a scarce resource. For this reason, two way relay network and cognitive radio technologies are required for better utilization of radio spectrum. Compared to the conventional one way relay network, both the uplink and the downlink can be served simultaneously using a two way relay network. Hence the effective bandwidth efficiency is considered to be one time slot per transmission. Cognitive networks are wireless networks that consist of different types of users, a primary user (PU, the primary license holder of a spectrum band) and secondary users (SU, cognitive radios that opportunistically access the PU spectrum). The secondary users can access the spectrum of the licensed user provided they do not harmfully affect to the primary user. In this thesis, various resource allocation and optimization techniques have been investigated for wireless relay and cognitive radio networks

Hybrid Processing Design for Multipair Massive MIMO Relaying with Channel Spatial Correlation

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) avails of simple transceiver design which can tackle many drawbacks of relay systems in terms of complicated signal processing, latency, and noise amplification. However, the cost and circuit complexity of having one radio frequency (RF) chain dedicated to each antenna element are prohibitive in practice. In this paper, we address this critical issue in amplify-and-forward (AF) relay systems using a hybrid analog and digital (A/D) transceiver structure. More specifically, leveraging the channel long-term properties, we design the analog beamformer which aims to minimize the channel estimation error and remain invariant over a long timescale. Then, the beamforming is completed by simple digital signal processing, i.e., maximum ratio combining/maximum ratio transmission (MRC/MRT) or zero-forcing (ZF) in the baseband domain. We present analytical bounds on the achievable spectral efficiency taking into account the spatial correlation and imperfect channel state information at the relay station. Our analytical results reveal that the hybrid A/D structure with ZF digital processor exploits spatial correlation and offers a higher spectral efficiency compared to the hybrid A/D structure with MRC/MRT scheme. Our numerical results showcase that the hybrid A/D beamforming design captures nearly 95% of the spectral efficiency of a fully digital AF relaying topology even by removing half of the RF chains. It is also shown that the hybrid A/D structure is robust to coarse quantization, and even with 2-bit resolution, the system can achieve more than 93% of the spectral efficiency offered by the same hybrid A/D topology with infinite resolution phase shifters.Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Communication

Mathematical optimization and signal processing techniques for cooperative wireless networks

The rapid growth of mobile users and emergence of high data rate multimedia and interactive services have resulted in a shortage of the radio spectrum. Novel solutions are therefore required for future generations of wireless networks to enhance capacity and coverage. This thesis aims at addressing this issue through the design and analysis of signal processing algorithms. In particular various resource allocation and spatial diversity techniques have been proposed within the context of wireless peer-to-peer relays and coordinated base station (BS) processing. In order to enhance coverage while providing improvement in capacity, peer-to-peer relays that share the same frequency band have been considered and various techniques for designing relay coefficients and allocating powers optimally are proposed. Both one-way and two-way amplify and forward (AF) relays have been investigated. In order to maintain fairness, a signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) balancing criterion has been adopted. In order to improve the spectrum utilization further, the relays within the context of cognitive radio network are also considered. In this case, a cognitive peer-to-peer relay network is required to achieve SINR balancing while maintaining the interference leakage to primary receiver below a certain threshold. As the spatial diversity techniques in the form of multiple-input-multipleoutput (MIMO) systems have the potential to enhance capacity significantly, the above work has been extended to peer-to-peer MIMO relay networks. Transceiver and relay beamforming design based on minimum mean-square error (MSE) criterion has been proposed. Establishing uplink downlink MSE duality, an alternating algorithm has been developed. A scenario where multiple users are served by both the BS and a MIMO relay is considered and a joint beamforming technique for the BS and the MIMO relay is proposed. With the motivation of optimising the transmission power at both the BS and the relay, an interference precoding design is presented that takes into account the knowledge of the interference caused by the relay to the users served by the BS. Recognizing joint beamformer design for multiple BSs has the ability to reduce interference in the network significantly, cooperative multi-cell beamforming design is proposed. The aim is to design multi-cell beamformers to maximize the minimum SINR of users subject to individual BS power constraints. In contrast to all works available in the literature that aimed at balancing SINR of all users in all cells to the same level, the SINRs of users in each cell is balanced and maximized at different values. This new technique takes advantage of the fact that BSs may have different available transmission powers and/or channel conditions for their users

Wireless transmission protocols using relays for broadcast and information exchange channels

Relays have been used to overcome existing network performance bottlenecks in meeting the growing demand for large bandwidth and high quality of service (QoS) in wireless networks. This thesis proposes several wireless transmission protocols using relays in practical multi-user broadcast and information exchange channels. The main theme is to demonstrate that efficient use of relays provides an additional dimension to improve reliability, throughput, power efficiency and secrecy. First, a spectrally efficient cooperative transmission protocol is proposed for the multiple-input and singleoutput (MISO) broadcast channel to improve the reliability of wireless transmission. The proposed protocol mitigates co-channel interference and provides another dimension to improve the diversity gain. Analytical and simulation results show that outage probability and the diversity and multiplexing tradeoff of the proposed cooperative protocol outperforms the non-cooperative scheme. Second, a two-way relaying protocol is proposed for the multi-pair, two-way relaying channel to improve the throughput and reliability. The proposed protocol enables both the users and the relay to participate in interference cancellation. Several beamforming schemes are proposed for the multi-antenna relay. Analytical and simulation results reveal that the proposed protocol delivers significant improvements in ergodic capacity, outage probability and the diversity and multiplexing tradeoff if compared to existing schemes. Third, a joint beamforming and power management scheme is proposed for multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) two-way relaying channel to improve the sum-rate. Network power allocation and power control optimisation problems are formulated and solved using convex optimisation techniques. Simulation results verify that the proposed scheme delivers better sum-rate or consumes lower power when compared to existing schemes. Fourth, two-way secrecy schemes which combine one-time pad and wiretap coding are proposed for the scalar broadcast channel to improve secrecy rate. The proposed schemes utilise the channel reciprocity and employ relays to forward secret messages. Analytical and simulation results reveal that the proposed schemes are able to achieve positive secrecy rates even when the number of users is large. All of these new wireless transmission protocols help to realise better throughput, reliability, power efficiency and secrecy for wireless broadcast and information exchange channels through the efficient use of relays

Optimization in multi-relay wireless networks

The concept of cooperation in communications has drawn a lot of research attention in recent years due to its potential to improve the efficiency of wireless networks. This new form of communications allows some users to act as relays and assist the transmission of other users' information signals. The aim of this thesis is to apply optimization techniques in the design of multi-relay wireless networks employing cooperative communications. In general, the thesis is organized into two parts: ``Distributed space-time coding' (DSTC) and ``Distributed beamforming', which cover two main approaches in cooperative communications over multi-relay networks. In Part I of the thesis, various aspects of distributed implementation of space-time coding in a wireless relay network are treated. First, the thesis proposes a new fully-diverse distributed code which allows noncoherent reception at the destination. Second, the problem of coordinating the power allocation (PA) between source and relays to achieve the optimal performance of DSTC is studied and a novel PA scheme is developed. It is shown that the proposed PA scheme can obtain the maximum diversity order of DSTC and significantly outperform other suboptimal PA schemes. Third, the thesis presents the optimal PA scheme to minimize the mean-square error (MSE) in channel estimation during training phase of DSTC. The effect of imperfect channel estimation to the performance of DSTC is also thoroughly studied. In Part II of the thesis, optimal distributed beamforming designs are developed for a wireless multiuser multi-relay network. Two design criteria for the optimal distributed beamforming at the relays are considered: (i) minimizing the total relay power subject to a guaranteed Quality of Service (QoS) measured in terms of signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) at the destinations, and (ii) jointly maximizing the SNR margin at the destinations subject to power constraints at the relays. Based on convex optimization techniques, it is shown that these problems can be formulated and solved via second-order conic programming (SOCP). In addition, this part also proposes simple and fast iterative algorithms to directly solve these optimization problems

Adaptive Beamforming for Distributed Relay Networks

Tremendous research work has been put into the realm of distributed relay networks, for its distinct advantages in exploiting spatial diversity, reducing the deployment cost and mitigating the effect of fading in wireless transmission without the multi-antenna requirement on the relay nodes. In typical relay networks, data transmission between a source and a destination is assisted by relay nodes with various relaying protocols. In this thesis, we investigate how to adaptively select the relay weights to meet specific interference suppressing requirements of the network. The thesis makes original contributions by proposing a filter-and-forward (FF) relay scheme in cognitive radio networks and an iterative algorithm based transceiver beamforming scheme for multi-pair relay networks. In the firstly proposed scheme, the relay nodes are adapted to deal with the inter-symbol-interference (ISI) that is introduced in the frequency-selective channel environment and the leakage interference introduced to the primary user. Our proposed scheme uses FF relay beamforming at the relay nodes to combat the frequency selective channel, and our scheme also aims to maximize the received SINR at the secondary destination, while suppressing the interference introduced to the primary user (PU). This scheme is further extended to accommodate a relay nodes output power constraint. Under certain criteria, the extended scheme can be transformed into two sub-schemes with lower computational complexity, where their closed-form solutions are derived. The probability that we can perform these transformations is also tested, which reveals under what circumstances our second scheme can be solved more easily. Then, we propose an iterative transceiver beamforming scheme for the multi-pair distributed relay networks. In our scheme, we consider multi-antenna users in one user group communicating with their partners in the other user group via distributed single-antenna relay nodes. We employ transceiver beamformers at the user nodes, and through our proposed iterative algorithm the relay nodes and user nodes can be coordinatively adapted to suppress the inter-pair-interference (IPI) while maximize the desired signal power. We also divide the rather difficult transceiver beamforming problem into three sub-problems, each of which can be solved with sub-optimal solutions. The transmit beamforming vectors, distributed relay coefficients and the receive beamforming vectors are obtained by iteratively solving these three sub-problems, each having a closed-form solution. The tasks of maximizing desired signal power, and reducing inter-pair interference (IPI) and noise are thus allocated to different iteration steps. By this arrangement, the transmit and receiver beamformers of each user are responsible for improving its own performance and the distributed relay nodes can be employed with simple amplify-and-forward(AF) protocols and only forward the received signal with proper scalar. This iterative relay beamforming scheme is further extended by distributing the computation tasks among each user and relay node, through which high computational efficiency can be ensured while extra overhead of bandwidth is need for sharing beamforming vector updates during the iteration steps. Furthermore, with respect to the channel uncertainty, two more relay strategies are proposed considering two different requirements from the communication network: sum relay output power and individual relay output power. At last, the application of the iterative relay beamforming method in cognitive radio networks is studied, where multiple pairs of users are considered as secondary users (SUs), and the designed transmit beamforming vector, relay beamforming vector and receive beamforming vector together guarantee that the inner interference of their transmissions is well suppressed while the interference introduced by them to the PU is restricted under a predefined threshold

Hybrid Transceiver Optimization for Multi-Hop Communications

Multi-hop communication with the aid of large-scale antenna arrays will play a vital role in future emergence communication systems. In this paper, we investigate amplify-and-forward based and multiple-input multiple-output assisted multi-hop communication, in which all nodes employ hybrid transceivers. Moreover, channel errors are taken into account in our hybrid transceiver design. Based on the matrix-monotonic optimization framework, the optimal structures of the robust hybrid transceivers are derived. By utilizing these optimal structures, the optimizations of analog transceivers and digital transceivers can be separated without loss of optimality. This fact greatly simplifies the joint optimization of analog and digital transceivers. Since the optimization of analog transceivers under unit-modulus constraints is non-convex, a projection type algorithm is proposed for analog transceiver optimization to overcome this difficulty. Based on the derived analog transceivers, the optimal digital transceivers can then be derived using matrix-monotonic optimization. Numeral results obtained demonstrate the performance advantages of the proposed hybrid transceiver designs over other existing solutions.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures. This manuscript has been submitted to IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (special issue on Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G

Collaborative Distributed Beamforming for Spectrum-Sharing Systems

The scarcity of bandwidth has always been the main obstacle for providing reliable high date-rate wireless links, which are in great demand to accommodate nowadays and immediate future wireless applications. In addition, recent reports have showed inefficient usage and under-utilization of the available bandwidth. Cognitive radio (CR) has recently emerged as a promising solution to enhance the spectrum utilization, where it offers the ability for unlicensed users to access the licensed spectrum opportunistically. On one hand, by allowing opportunistic spectrum access, the overall spectrum utilization can be improved. On the other hand, transmission from cognitive nodes can cause severe interference to the licensed users of the spectrum. This requires cognitive radio networks (CRNs) to consider two essential design targets, namely, maximizing the spectrum utilization and minimizing the interference caused to the primary users (PUs). Such interference can be reduced through proper resource allocation, power control or other degrees of freedom techniques such as beamforming. In this thesis, we aim to use joint distributed beamforming and cooperative relaying in spectrum-sharing systems in an effort to enhance the spectrum efficiency and improve the performance of the secondary system. We investigate a one-way cooperative spectrum-sharing system in the presence of one PU and multiple PUs. We study two relaying schemes, namely, decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying in conjunction with distributed optimal beamforming. We employ zero forcing beamforming (ZFB) as a sub-optimal scheme, and compare both approaches through simulations. For both schemes, we derive closed-form expressions and asymptotic expressions for the outage probability and bit error rate (BER) over independent and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channels for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (M-QAM) schemes. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the combination of the cooperative diversity and distributed beamforming in compensating for the loss in the secondary system's performance due to the primary user's co-channel interference (CCI). To further improve the spectrum efficiency, we employ distributed beamforming in two-way AF cooperative spectrum-sharing systems in the presence of multiple PUs. For this system, we investigate the transmission protocols over two, three and four time-slots. Our results show that the three time-slot protocol outperforms the two time-slot and four time-slot protocols in certain scenarios where it offers a good compromise between bandwidth efficiency and system performance. We extend the two-way relaying system to the DF scheme, where two practical two-way relaying strategies are investigated, namely, DF-XORing (bit-wise level) and DF-superposition (symbol-wise level). For each relaying strategy, we derive general optimal beamforming vectors and sup-optimal ZFB vectors at the relays. Employing ZFB, we present an analytical framework of the secondary system considering the effect of the primary-secondary mutual CCIs. Our results show that, when the received signals at the relays are weighted equally, the DF-XOR always outperforms both DF-superposition and AF relaying. In the last part of the thesis, we consider a limited feedback system model by assuming partial channel state information (CSI) of the interference channel between the secondary relays and primary receiver. In particular, the CSI feedback is limited only to the quantized channel direction information (CDI). To investigate the effect of the quantized CDI on the secondary system's performance, we derive closed-form expressions for the outage probability and the BER considering the mutual secondary-primary CCI. In the simulation results, we compare the system performance of the limited feedback with the perfect CSI. Our results show that the performance improves as the number of feedback bits increases