Relays for Interference Mitigation in Wireless Networks

Wireless links play an important role in the last mile network connectivity. In contrast to the strictly centralized approach of today's wireless systems, the future promises decentralization of network management. Nodes potentially engage in localized grouping and organization based on their neighborhood to carry out complex goals such as end-to-end communication. The quadratic energy dissipation of the wireless medium necessitates the presence of certain relay nodes in the network. Conventionally, the role of such relays is limited to passing messages in a chain in a point-point hopping architecture. With the decentralization, multiple nodes could potentially interfere with each other. This work proposes a technique to exploit the presence of relays in a way that mitigates interference between the network nodes. Optimal spatial locations and transmission schemes which enhance this gain are identified

On Capacity and Optimal Scheduling for the Half-Duplex Multiple-Relay Channel

We study the half-duplex multiple-relay channel (HD-MRC) where every node can either transmit or listen but cannot do both at the same time. We obtain a capacity upper bound based on a max-flow min-cut argument and achievable transmission rates based on the decode-forward (DF) coding strategy, for both the discrete memoryless HD-MRC and the phase-fading HD-MRC. We discover that both the upper bound and the achievable rates are functions of the transmit/listen state (a description of which nodes transmit and which receive). More precisely, they are functions of the time fraction of the different states, which we term a schedule. We formulate the optimal scheduling problem to find an optimal schedule that maximizes the DF rate. The optimal scheduling problem turns out to be a maximin optimization, for which we propose an algorithmic solution. We demonstrate our approach on a four-node multiple-relay channel, obtaining closed-form solutions in certain scenarios. Furthermore, we show that for the received signal-to-noise ratio degraded phase-fading HD-MRC, the optimal scheduling problem can be simplified to a max optimization.Comment: Author's final version (to appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theory