Outage Capacity and Optimal Transmission for Dying Channels

In wireless networks, communication links may be subject to random fatal impacts: for example, sensor networks under sudden power losses or cognitive radio networks with unpredictable primary user spectrum occupancy. Under such circumstances, it is critical to quantify how fast and reliably the information can be collected over attacked links. For a single point-to-point channel subject to a random attack, named as a \emph{dying channel}, we model it as a block-fading (BF) channel with a finite and random delay constraint. First, we define the outage capacity as the performance measure, followed by studying the optimal coding length $K$ such that the outage probability is minimized when uniform power allocation is assumed. For a given rate target and a coding length $K$, we then minimize the outage probability over the power allocation vector \mv{P}_{K}, and show that this optimization problem can be cast into a convex optimization problem under some conditions. The optimal solutions for several special cases are discussed. Furthermore, we extend the single point-to-point dying channel result to the parallel multi-channel case where each sub-channel is a dying channel, and investigate the corresponding asymptotic behavior of the overall outage probability with two different attack models: the independent-attack case and the $m$-dependent-attack case. It can be shown that the overall outage probability diminishes to zero for both cases as the number of sub-channels increases if the \emph{rate per unit cost} is less than a certain threshold. The outage exponents are also studied to reveal how fast the outage probability improves over the number of sub-channels.Comment: 31 pages, 9 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Outage Capacity of Incremental Relaying at Low Signal-to-Noise Ratios

We present the \epsilon-outage capacity of incremental relaying at low signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) in a wireless cooperative network with slow Rayleigh fading channels. The relay performs decode-and-forward and repetition coding is employed in the network, which is optimal in the low SNR regime. We derive an expression on the optimal relay location that maximizes the \epsilon-outage capacity. It is shown that this location is independent of the outage probability and SNR but only depends on the channel conditions represented by a path-loss factor. We compare our results to the \epsilon-outage capacity of the cut-set bound and demonstrate that the ratio between the \epsilon-outage capacity of incremental relaying and the cut-set bound lies within 1/\sqrt{2} and 1. Furthermore, we derive lower bounds on the \epsilon-outage capacity for the case of K relays.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to be presented at VTC Fall 2009 in Anchorage, Alask

From Multi-Keyholes to Measure of Correlation and Power Imbalance in MIMO Channels: Outage Capacity Analysis

An information-theoretic analysis of a multi-keyhole channel, which includes a number of statistically independent keyholes with possibly different correlation matrices, is given. When the number of keyholes or/and the number of Tx/Rx antennas is large, there is an equivalent Rayleigh-fading channel such that the outage capacities of both channels are asymptotically equal. In the case of a large number of antennas and for a broad class of fading distributions, the instantaneous capacity is shown to be asymptotically Gaussian in distribution, and compact, closed-form expressions for the mean and variance are given. Motivated by the asymptotic analysis, a simple, full-ordering scalar measure of spatial correlation and power imbalance in MIMO channels is introduced, which quantifies the negative impact of these two factors on the outage capacity in a simple and well-tractable way. It does not require the eigenvalue decomposition, and has the full-ordering property. The size-asymptotic results are used to prove Telatar's conjecture for semi-correlated multi-keyhole and Rayleigh channels. Since the keyhole channel model approximates well the relay channel in the amplify-and-forward mode in certain scenarios, these results also apply to the latterComment: accepted by IEEE IT Trans., 201

Outage Capacity of Bursty Amplify-and-Forward with Incremental Relaying

We derive the outage capacity of a bursty version of the amplify-and-forward (BAF) protocol for small signal-to-noise ratios when incremental relaying is used. We show that the ratio between the outage capacities of BAF and the cut-set bound is independent of the relay position and that BAF is outage optimal for certain conditions on the target rate R. This is in contrast to decode-and-forward with incremental relaying, where the relay location strongly determines the performance of the cooperative protocol. We further derive the outage capacity for a network consisting of an arbitrary number of relay nodes. In this case the relays transmit in subsequent partitions of the overall transmission block and the destination accumulates signal-to-noise ratio until it is able to decode.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, Austin, TX, June 13-18, 201