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

Cooperative Symbol-Based Signaling for Networks with Multiple Relays

Wireless channels suffer from severe inherent impairments and hence reliable and high data rate wireless transmission is particularly challenging to achieve. Fortunately, using multiple antennae improves performance in wireless transmission by providing space diversity, spatial multiplexing, and power gains. However, in wireless ad-hoc networks multiple antennae may not be acceptable due to limitations in size, cost, and hardware complexity. As a result, cooperative relaying strategies have attracted considerable attention because of their abilities to take advantage of multi-antenna by using multiple single-antenna relays. This study is to explore cooperative signaling for different relay networks, such as multi-hop relay networks formed by multiple single-antenna relays and multi-stage relay networks formed by multiple relaying stages with each stage holding several single-antenna relays. The main contribution of this study is the development of a new relaying scheme for networks using symbol-level modulation, such as binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK). We also analyze effects of this newly developed scheme when it is used with space-time coding in a multi-stage relay network. Simulation results demonstrate that the new scheme outperforms previously proposed schemes: amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme and decode-and-forward (DF) scheme

Degrees of Freedom of Two-Hop Wireless Networks: "Everyone Gets the Entire Cake"

We show that fully connected two-hop wireless networks with K sources, K relays and K destinations have K degrees of freedom both in the case of time-varying channel coefficients and in the case of constant channel coefficients (in which case the result holds for almost all values of constant channel coefficients). Our main contribution is a new achievability scheme which we call Aligned Network Diagonalization. This scheme allows the data streams transmitted by the sources to undergo a diagonal linear transformation from the sources to the destinations, thus being received free of interference by their intended destination. In addition, we extend our scheme to multi-hop networks with fully connected hops, and multi-hop networks with MIMO nodes, for which the degrees of freedom are also fully characterized.Comment: Presented at the 2012 Allerton Conference. Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Cooperative network-coding system for wireless sensor networks

Describes a cooperative network coding system for wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we propose two practical power) and bandwidth)efficient systems based on amplify)and)forward (AF) and decode)and)forward (DF) schemes to address the problem of information exchange via a relay. The key idea is to channel encode each source’s message by using a high)performance non)binary turbo code based on Partial Unit Memory (PUM) codes to enhance the bit)error)rate performance, then reduce the energy consumption and increase spectrum efficiency by using network coding (NC) to combine individual nodes’ messages at the relay before forwarding to the destination. Two simple and low complexity physical layer NC schemes are proposed based on combinations of received source messages at the relay. We also present the theoretical limits and numerical analysis of the proposed schemes. Simulation results under Additive White Gaussian Noise, confirm that the proposed schemes achieve significant bandwidth savings and fewer transmissions over the benchmark systems which do not resort to NC. Theoretical limits for capacity and Signal to Noise Ratio behaviour for the proposed schemes are derived. The paper also proposes a cooperative strategy that is useful when insufficient combined messages are received at a node to recover the desired source messages, thus enabling the system to retrieve all packets with significantly fewer retransmission request messages

Optimal Coding Functions for Pairwise Message Sharing on Finite-Field Multi-Way Relay Channels

This paper considers the finite-field multi-way relay channel with pairwise message sharing, where multiple users exchange messages through a single relay and where the users may share parts of their source messages (meaning that some message parts are known/common to more than one user). In this paper, we design an optimal functional-decode-forward coding scheme that takes the shared messages into account. More specifically, we design an optimal function for the relay to decode (from the users on the uplink) and forward (back to the users on the downlink). We then show that this proposed function-decode-forward coding scheme can achieve the capacity region of the finite-field multi-way relay channel with pairwise message sharing. This paper generalizes our previous result for the case of three users to any number of users.Comment: Author's final version (accepted for presentation at the 2014 IEEE International Conference on Communications [ICC 2014]