1,474 research outputs found
Reliable Physical Layer Network Coding
When two or more users in a wireless network transmit simultaneously, their
electromagnetic signals are linearly superimposed on the channel. As a result,
a receiver that is interested in one of these signals sees the others as
unwanted interference. This property of the wireless medium is typically viewed
as a hindrance to reliable communication over a network. However, using a
recently developed coding strategy, interference can in fact be harnessed for
network coding. In a wired network, (linear) network coding refers to each
intermediate node taking its received packets, computing a linear combination
over a finite field, and forwarding the outcome towards the destinations. Then,
given an appropriate set of linear combinations, a destination can solve for
its desired packets. For certain topologies, this strategy can attain
significantly higher throughputs over routing-based strategies. Reliable
physical layer network coding takes this idea one step further: using
judiciously chosen linear error-correcting codes, intermediate nodes in a
wireless network can directly recover linear combinations of the packets from
the observed noisy superpositions of transmitted signals. Starting with some
simple examples, this survey explores the core ideas behind this new technique
and the possibilities it offers for communication over interference-limited
wireless networks.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figures, survey paper to appear in Proceedings of the
IEE
Compute-and-Forward: Harnessing Interference through Structured Codes
Interference is usually viewed as an obstacle to communication in wireless
networks. This paper proposes a new strategy, compute-and-forward, that
exploits interference to obtain significantly higher rates between users in a
network. The key idea is that relays should decode linear functions of
transmitted messages according to their observed channel coefficients rather
than ignoring the interference as noise. After decoding these linear equations,
the relays simply send them towards the destinations, which given enough
equations, can recover their desired messages. The underlying codes are based
on nested lattices whose algebraic structure ensures that integer combinations
of codewords can be decoded reliably. Encoders map messages from a finite field
to a lattice and decoders recover equations of lattice points which are then
mapped back to equations over the finite field. This scheme is applicable even
if the transmitters lack channel state information.Comment: IEEE Trans. Info Theory, to appear. 23 pages, 13 figure
Wireless Network Information Flow: A Deterministic Approach
In a wireless network with a single source and a single destination and an
arbitrary number of relay nodes, what is the maximum rate of information flow
achievable? We make progress on this long standing problem through a two-step
approach. First we propose a deterministic channel model which captures the key
wireless properties of signal strength, broadcast and superposition. We obtain
an exact characterization of the capacity of a network with nodes connected by
such deterministic channels. This result is a natural generalization of the
celebrated max-flow min-cut theorem for wired networks. Second, we use the
insights obtained from the deterministic analysis to design a new
quantize-map-and-forward scheme for Gaussian networks. In this scheme, each
relay quantizes the received signal at the noise level and maps it to a random
Gaussian codeword for forwarding, and the final destination decodes the
source's message based on the received signal. We show that, in contrast to
existing schemes, this scheme can achieve the cut-set upper bound to within a
gap which is independent of the channel parameters. In the case of the relay
channel with a single relay as well as the two-relay Gaussian diamond network,
the gap is 1 bit/s/Hz. Moreover, the scheme is universal in the sense that the
relays need no knowledge of the values of the channel parameters to
(approximately) achieve the rate supportable by the network. We also present
extensions of the results to multicast networks, half-duplex networks and
ergodic networks.Comment: To appear in IEEE transactions on Information Theory, Vol 57, No 4,
April 201
Computation Alignment: Capacity Approximation without Noise Accumulation
Consider several source nodes communicating across a wireless network to a
destination node with the help of several layers of relay nodes. Recent work by
Avestimehr et al. has approximated the capacity of this network up to an
additive gap. The communication scheme achieving this capacity approximation is
based on compress-and-forward, resulting in noise accumulation as the messages
traverse the network. As a consequence, the approximation gap increases
linearly with the network depth.
This paper develops a computation alignment strategy that can approach the
capacity of a class of layered, time-varying wireless relay networks up to an
approximation gap that is independent of the network depth. This strategy is
based on the compute-and-forward framework, which enables relays to decode
deterministic functions of the transmitted messages. Alone, compute-and-forward
is insufficient to approach the capacity as it incurs a penalty for
approximating the wireless channel with complex-valued coefficients by a
channel with integer coefficients. Here, this penalty is circumvented by
carefully matching channel realizations across time slots to create
integer-valued effective channels that are well-suited to compute-and-forward.
Unlike prior constant gap results, the approximation gap obtained in this paper
also depends closely on the fading statistics, which are assumed to be i.i.d.
Rayleigh.Comment: 36 pages, to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor
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