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

Secure Communication with a Wireless-Powered Friendly Jammer

In this paper, we propose to use a wireless-powered friendly jammer to enable secure communication between a source node and destination node, in the presence of an eavesdropper. We consider a two-phase communication protocol with fixed-rate transmission. In the first phase, wireless power transfer is conducted from the source to the jammer. In the second phase, the source transmits the information-bearing signal under the protection of a jamming signal sent by the jammer using the harvested energy in the first phase. We analytically characterize the long-time behavior of the proposed protocol and derive a closed-form expression for the throughput. We further optimize the rate parameters for maximizing the throughput subject to a secrecy outage probability constraint. Our analytical results show that the throughput performance differs significantly between the single-antenna jammer case and the multi-antenna jammer case. For instance, as the source transmit power increases, the throughput quickly reaches an upper bound with single-antenna jammer, while the throughput grows unbounded with multi-antenna jammer. Our numerical results also validate the derived analytical results.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

MIMO Networks: the Effects of Interference

Multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) systems promise enormous capacity increase and are being considered as one of the key technologies for future wireless networks. However, the decrease in capacity due to the presence of interferers in MIMO networks is not well understood. In this paper, we develop an analytical framework to characterize the capacity of MIMO communication systems in the presence of multiple MIMO co-channel interferers and noise. We consider the situation in which transmitters have no information about the channel and all links undergo Rayleigh fading. We first generalize the known determinant representation of hypergeometric functions with matrix arguments to the case when the argument matrices have eigenvalues of arbitrary multiplicity. This enables the derivation of the distribution of the eigenvalues of Gaussian quadratic forms and Wishart matrices with arbitrary correlation, with application to both single user and multiuser MIMO systems. In particular, we derive the ergodic mutual information for MIMO systems in the presence of multiple MIMO interferers. Our analysis is valid for any number of interferers, each with arbitrary number of antennas having possibly unequal power levels. This framework, therefore, accommodates the study of distributed MIMO systems and accounts for different positions of the MIMO interferers.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Info. Theor