Feedback and Cooperation in Wireless Networks

The demand for wireless data services has been dramatically growing over the last decade. This growth has been accompanied by a significant increase in the number of users sharing the same wireless medium, and as a result, interference management has become a hot topic of research in recent years. In this dissertation, we investigate feedback and transmitter cooperation as two closely related tools to manage the interference and achieve high data rates in several wireless networks, focusing on additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) interference, X, and broadcast channels. We start by a one-to-many network, namely, the three-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) Gaussian broadcast channel, where we assume that the transmitter obtains the channel state information (CSI) through feedback links after a finite delay. We also assume that the feedback delay is greater than the channel coherence time, and thus, the CSI expires prior to being exploited by the transmitter for its current transmission. Nevertheless, we show that this delayed CSI at the transmitter (delayed CSIT) can help the transmitter to achieve significantly higher data rates compared to having no CSI. We indeed show that delayed CSIT increases the channel degrees of freedom (DoF), which is translated to an unbounded increase in capacity with increasing signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). For the symmetric case, i.e. with the same number of antennas at each receiver, we propose different transmission schemes whose achievable DoFs meet the upper bound for a wide range of transmit-receive antenna ratios. Also, for the general non-symmetric case, we propose transmission schemes that characterize the DoF region for certain classes of antenna configurations. Subsequently, we investigate channels with distributed transmitters, namely, Gaussian single-input single-output (SISO) K-user interference channel and 2×K X channel under the delayed CSIT assumption. In these channels, in major contrast to the broadcast channel, each transmitter has access only to its own messages. We propose novel multiphase transmission schemes wherein the transmitters collaboratively align the past interference at appropriate receivers using the knowledge of past CSI. Our achievable DoFs are greater than one (which is the channel DoF without CSIT), and strictly increasing in K. Our results are yet the best available reported DoFs for these channels with delayed CSIT. Furthermore, we consider the K-user r-cyclic interference channel, where each transmitter causes interference on only r receivers in a cyclic manner. By developing a new upper bound, we show that this channel has K/r DoF with no CSIT. Moreover, by generalizing our multiphase transmission ideas, we show that, for r=3, this channel can achieve strictly greater than K/3 DoF with delayed CSIT. Next, we add the capability of simultaneous transmission and reception, i.e. full-duplex operation, to the transmitters, and investigate its impact on the DoF of the SISO Gaussian K-user interference and M×K X channel under the delayed CSIT assumption. By proposing new cooperation/alignment techniques, we show that the full-duplex transmitter cooperation can potentially yield DoF gains in both channels with delayed CSIT. This is in sharp contrast to the previous results on these channels indicating the inability of full-duplex transmitter cooperation to increase the channel DoF with either perfect instantaneous CSIT or no CSIT. With the recent technological advances in implementation of full-duplex communication, it is expected to play a crucial role in the future wireless systems. Finally, we consider the Gaussian K-user interference and K×K X channel with output feedback, wherein each transmitter causally accesses the output of its paired receiver. First, using the output feedback and under no CSIT assumption, we show that both channels can achieve DoF values greater than one, strictly increasing in K, and approaching the limiting value of 2 as K→∞. Then, we develop transmission schemes for the same channels with both output feedback and delayed CSIT, known as Shannon feedback. Our achievable DoFs with Shannon feedback are greater than those with the output feedback for almost all values of K

On Constant Gaps for the Two-way Gaussian Interference Channel

We introduce the two-way Gaussian interference channel in which there are four nodes with four independent messages: two-messages to be transmitted over a Gaussian interference channel in the $\rightarrow$ direction, simultaneously with two-messages to be transmitted over an interference channel (in-band, full-duplex) in the $\leftarrow$ direction. In such a two-way network, all nodes are transmitters and receivers of messages, allowing them to adapt current channel inputs to previously received channel outputs. We propose two new outer bounds on the symmetric sum-rate for the two-way Gaussian interference channel with complex channel gains: one under full adaptation (all 4 nodes are permitted to adapt inputs to previous outputs), and one under partial adaptation (only 2 nodes are permitted to adapt, the other 2 are restricted). We show that simple non-adaptive schemes such as the Han and Kobayashi scheme, where inputs are functions of messages only and not past outputs, utilized in each direction are sufficient to achieve within a constant gap of these fully or partially adaptive outer bounds for all channel regimes.Comment: presented at 50th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing, Monticello, IL, October 201

Capacity of All Nine Models of Channel Output Feedback for the Two-user Interference Channel

In this paper, we study the impact of different channel output feedback architectures on the capacity of the two-user interference channel. For a two-user interference channel, a feedback link can exist between receivers and transmitters in 9 canonical architectures (see Fig. 2), ranging from only one feedback link to four feedback links. We derive the exact capacity region for the symmetric deterministic interference channel and the constant-gap capacity region for the symmetric Gaussian interference channel for all of the 9 architectures. We show that for a linear deterministic symmetric interference channel, in the weak interference regime, all models of feedback, except the one, which has only one of the receivers feeding back to its own transmitter, have the identical capacity region. When only one of the receivers feeds back to its own transmitter, the capacity region is a strict subset of the capacity region of the rest of the feedback models in the weak interference regime. However, the sum-capacity of all feedback models is identical in the weak interference regime. Moreover, in the strong interference regime all models of feedback with at least one of the receivers feeding back to its own transmitter have the identical sum-capacity. For the Gaussian interference channel, the results of the linear deterministic model follow, where capacity is replaced with approximate capacity.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, results improved by deriving capacity region of all 9 canonical feedback models in two-user interference channe

On the Capacity of Symmetric Gaussian Interference Channels with Feedback

In this paper, we propose a new coding scheme for symmetric Gaussian interference channels with feedback based on the ideas of time-varying coding schemes. The proposed scheme improves the Suh-Tse and Kramer inner bounds of the channel capacity for the cases of weak and not very strong interference. This improvement is more significant when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is not very high. It is shown theoretically and numerically that our coding scheme can outperform the Kramer code. In addition, the generalized degrees-of-freedom of our proposed coding scheme is equal to the Suh-Tse scheme in the strong interference case. The numerical results show that our coding scheme can attain better performance than the Suh-Tse coding scheme for all channel parameters. Furthermore, the simplicity of the encoding/decoding algorithms is another strong point of our proposed coding scheme compared with the Suh-Tse coding scheme. More importantly, our results show that an optimal coding scheme for the symmetric Gaussian interference channels with feedback can be achieved by using only marginal posterior distributions under a better cooperation strategy between transmitters.Comment: To appear in Proc. of IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory (ISIT), Hong Kong, June 14-19, 201