Cooperative diversity techniques for high-throughput wireless relay networks

Relay communications has attracted a growing interest in wireless communications with application to various enhanced technologies. This thesis considers a number of issues related to data throughput in various wireless relay network models. Particularly, new implementations of network coding (NC) and space-time coding (STC) techniques are investigated to offer various means of achieving high-throughput relay communications. Firstly, this thesis investigates different practical automatic repeat request (ARQ) retransmission protocols based on NC for two-way wireless relay networks to improve throughput efficiency. Two improved NC-based ARQ schemes are designed based on go-back-N and selective-repeat (SR) protocols. Addressing ARQ issues in multisource multidestination relay networks, a new NC-based ARQ protocol is proposed and two packet-combination algorithms are developed for retransmissions at relay and sources to significantly improve the throughput. In relation to the concept of channel quality indicator (CQI) reporting in two-way relay networks, two new efficient CQI reporting schemes are designed based on NC to improve the system throughput by allowing two terminals to simultaneously estimate the CQI of the distant terminal-relay link without incurring additional overhead. The transmission time for CQI feedback at the relays is reduced by half while the increase in complexity and the loss of performance are shown to be negligible. Furthermore, a low-complexity relay selection scheme is suggested to reduce the relay searching complexity. For the acknowledgment (ACK) process, this thesis proposes a new block ACK scheme based on NC to significantly reduce the ACK overheads and therefore produce an enhanced throughput. The proposed scheme is also shown to improve the reliability of block ACK transmission and reduce the number of data retransmissions for a higher system throughput. Additionally, this thesis presents a new cooperative retransmission scheme based on relay cooperation and NC to considerably reduce the number of retransmission packets and im- prove the reliability of retransmissions for a more power efficient and higher throughput system with non-overlapped retransmissions. Moreover, two relay selection schemes are recommended to determine the optimised number of relays for the retransmission. Finally, with respect to cognitive wireless relay networks (CWRNs), this thesis proposes a new cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme to improve the spectrum sensing performance and design a new CSS scheme based on NC for three-hop CWRNs to improve system throughput. Furthermore, a new distributed space-time-frequency block code (DSTFBC) is designed for a two- hop nonregenerative CWRN over frequency-selective fading channels. The proposed DSTFBC design achieves higher data rate, spatial diversity gain, and decoupling detection of data blocks at all destination nodes with a low-complexity receiver structure

Approximations for Performance Analysis in Wireless Communications and Applications to Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

In the last few decades, the field of wireless communications has witnessed significant technological advancements to meet the needs of today’s modern world. The rapidly emerging technologies, however, are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and the process of investigating their performance and assessing their applicability in the real world is becoming more challenging. That has aroused a relatively wide range of solutions in the literature to study the performance of the different communication systems or even draw new results that were difficult to obtain. These solutions include field measurements, computer simulations, and theoretical solutions such as alternative representations, approximations, or bounds of classic functions that commonly appear in performance analyses. Field measurements and computer simulations have significantly improved performance evaluation in communication theory. However, more advanced theoretical solutions can be further developed in order to avoid using the ex- pensive and time-consuming wireless communications measurements, replace the numerical simulations, which can sometimes be unreliable and suffer from failures in numerical evaluation, and achieve analytically simpler results with much higher accuracy levels than the existing theoretical ones. To this end, this thesis firstly focuses on developing new approximations and bounds using unified approaches and algorithms that can efficiently and accurately guide researchers through the design of their adopted wireless systems and facilitate the conducted performance analyses in the various communication systems. Two performance measures are of primary interest in this study, namely the average error probability and the ergodic capacity, due to their valuable role in conducting a better understanding of the systems’ behavior and thus enabling systems engineers to quickly detect and resolve design issues that might arise. In particular, several parametric expressions of different analytical forms are developed to approximate or bound the Gaussian Q-function, which occurs in the error probability analysis. Additionally, any generic function of the Q-function is approximated or bounded using a tractable exponential expression. Moreover, a unified logarithmic expression is proposed to approximate or bound the capacity integrals that occur in the capacity analysis. A novel systematic methodology and a modified version of the classical Remez algorithm are developed to acquire optimal coefficients for the accompanying parametric approximation or bound in the minimax sense. Furthermore, the quasi-Newton algorithm is implemented to acquire optimal coefficients in terms of the total error. The average symbol error probability and ergodic capacity are evaluated for various applications using the developed tools. Secondly, this thesis analyzes a couple of communication systems assisted with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). RIS has been gaining significant attention lately due to its ability to control propagation environments. In particular, two communication systems are considered; one with a single RIS and correlated Rayleigh fading channels, and the other with multiple RISs and non-identical generic fading channels. Both systems are analyzed in terms of outage probability, average symbol error probability, and ergodic capacity, which are derived using the proposed tools. These performance measures reveal that better performance is achieved when assisting the communication system with RISs, increasing the number of reflecting elements equipped on the RISs, or locating the RISs nearer to either communication node. In conclusion, the developed approximations and bounds, together with the optimized coefficients, provide more efficient tools than those available in the literature, with richer capabilities reflected by the more robust closed-form performance analysis, significant increase in accuracy levels, and considerable reduction in analytical complexity which in turns can offer more understanding into the systems’ behavior and the effect of the different parameters on their performance. Therefore, they are expected to lay the groundwork for the investigation of the latest communication technologies, such as RIS technology, whose performance has been studied for some system models in this thesis using the developed tools