Two-path succesive relaying schemes in the presence of inter-relay interference

Relaying is a promising technique to improve wireless network performance. A conventional relay transmits and receives signals in two orthogonal channels due to half duplex constraint of wireless network. This results in inefficient use of spectral resources. Two-Path Successive Relaying (TPSR) has been proposed to recover loss in spectral efficiency. However, the performance of TPSR is degraded by Inter-Relay Interference (IRI). This thesis investigates the performance of TPSR affected by IRI and proposes several schemes to improve relaying reliability, throughput and secrecy. Simulations revealed that the existing TPSR could perform worse than the conventional Half Duplex Relaying (HDR) scheme. Opportunistic TPSR schemes are proposed to improve the capacity performance. Several relay pair selection criteria are developed to ensure the selection of the best performing relay pair. Adaptive schemes which dynamically switch between TPSR and conventional HDR are proposed to further improve the performance. Simulation and analytical results show that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 45% ergodic capacity improvement and lower outage probability compared to baseline schemes, while achieving the maximum diversity and multiplexing tradeoff of the multi-input single-output channel. In addition, this thesis proposes secrecy TPSR schemes to protect secrecy of wireless transmission from eavesdropper. The use of two relays in the proposed schemes deliver more robust secrecy transmission while the use of scheduled jamming signals improves secrecy rate. Simulation and analytical results reveal that the proposed schemes can achieve up to 62% ergodic secrecy capacity improvement and quadratically lower intercept and secrecy outage probabilities if compared to existing schemes. Overall, this thesis demonstrates that the proposed TPSR schemes are able to deliver performance improvement in terms of throughput, reliability and secrecy in the presence of IRI

Opportunistic Relaying in Wireless Networks

Relay networks having $n$ source-to-destination pairs and $m$ half-duplex relays, all operating in the same frequency band in the presence of block fading, are analyzed. This setup has attracted significant attention and several relaying protocols have been reported in the literature. However, most of the proposed solutions require either centrally coordinated scheduling or detailed channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. Here, an opportunistic relaying scheme is proposed, which alleviates these limitations. The scheme entails a two-hop communication protocol, in which sources communicate with destinations only through half-duplex relays. The key idea is to schedule at each hop only a subset of nodes that can benefit from \emph{multiuser diversity}. To select the source and destination nodes for each hop, it requires only CSI at receivers (relays for the first hop, and destination nodes for the second hop) and an integer-value CSI feedback to the transmitters. For the case when $n$ is large and $m$ is fixed, it is shown that the proposed scheme achieves a system throughput of $m/2$ bits/s/Hz. In contrast, the information-theoretic upper bound of $(m/2)\log \log n$ bits/s/Hz is achievable only with more demanding CSI assumptions and cooperation between the relays. Furthermore, it is shown that, under the condition that the product of block duration and system bandwidth scales faster than $\log n$, the achievable throughput of the proposed scheme scales as $\Theta ({\log n})$. Notably, this is proven to be the optimal throughput scaling even if centralized scheduling is allowed, thus proving the optimality of the proposed scheme in the scaling law sense.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Relaying in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

The deployment of relays between Internet of Things (IoT) end devices and gateways can improve link quality. In cellular-based IoT, relays have the potential to reduce base station overload. The energy expended in single-hop long-range communication can be reduced if relays listen to transmissions of end devices and forward these observations to gateways. However, incorporating relays into IoT networks faces some challenges. IoT end devices are designed primarily for uplink communication of small-sized observations toward the network; hence, opportunistically using end devices as relays needs a redesign of both the medium access control (MAC) layer protocol of such end devices and possible addition of new communication interfaces. Additionally, the wake-up time of IoT end devices needs to be synchronized with that of the relays. For cellular-based IoT, the possibility of using infrastructure relays exists, and noncellular IoT networks can leverage the presence of mobile devices for relaying, for example, in remote healthcare. However, the latter presents problems of incentivizing relay participation and managing the mobility of relays. Furthermore, although relays can increase the lifetime of IoT networks, deploying relays implies the need for additional batteries to power them. This can erode the energy efficiency gain that relays offer. Therefore, designing relay-assisted IoT networks that provide acceptable trade-offs is key, and this goes beyond adding an extra transmit RF chain to a relay-enabled IoT end device. There has been increasing research interest in IoT relaying, as demonstrated in the available literature. Works that consider these issues are surveyed in this paper to provide insight into the state of the art, provide design insights for network designers and motivate future research directions

Resource allocation for two source-destination pairs sharing a single relay with a buffer

In this paper, we obtain the optimal resource allocation scheme in order to maximize the achievable rate region in a dual-hop system that consists of two independent source-destination pairs sharing a single half-duplex relay. The relay decodes the received information and possesses buffers to enable storing the information temporarily before forwarding it to the respective destination. We consider both non-orthogonal transmission with successive interference cancellation at the receivers and orthogonal transmission. Also, we consider Gaussian block-fading channels and we assume that the channel state information is known and that no delay constraints are required. We show that, with the aid of buffering at the relay, joint user-and-hop scheduling is optimal and can enhance the achievable rate significantly. This is due to the joint exploitation of multiuser diversity and multihop diversity in the system. We provide closed-form expressions to characterize the average achievable rates in a generic form as functions of the statistical model of the channels. Furthermore, we consider sub-optimal schemes that exploit the diversity in the system partially and we provide numerical results to compare the different schemes and demonstrate the gains of the optimal one. © 2014 IEEE