Linear Precoders for Non-Regenerative Asymmetric Two-way Relaying in Cellular Systems

Two-way relaying (TWR) reduces the spectral-efficiency loss caused in conventional half-duplex relaying. TWR is possible when two nodes exchange data simultaneously through a relay. In cellular systems, data exchange between base station (BS) and users is usually not simultaneous e.g., a user (TUE) has uplink data to transmit during multiple access (MAC) phase, but does not have downlink data to receive during broadcast (BC) phase. This non-simultaneous data exchange will reduce TWR to spectrally-inefficient conventional half-duplex relaying. With infrastructure relays, where multiple users communicate through a relay, a new transmission protocol is proposed to recover the spectral loss. The BC phase following the MAC phase of TUE is now used by the relay to transmit downlink data to another user (RUE). RUE will not be able to cancel the back-propagating interference. A structured precoder is designed at the multi-antenna relay to cancel this interference. With multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) nodes, the proposed precoder also triangulates the compound MAC and BC phase MIMO channels. The channel triangulation reduces the weighted sum-rate optimization to power allocation problem, which is then cast as a geometric program. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed protocol over conventional solutions.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Recovering Multiplexing Loss Through Successive Relaying Using Repetition Coding

In this paper, a transmission protocol is studied for a two relay wireless network in which simple repetition coding is applied at the relays. Information-theoretic achievable rates for this transmission scheme are given, and a space-time V-BLAST signalling and detection method that can approach them is developed. It is shown through the diversity multiplexing tradeoff analysis that this transmission scheme can recover the multiplexing loss of the half-duplex relay network, while retaining some diversity gain. This scheme is also compared with conventional transmission protocols that exploit only the diversity of the network at the cost of a multiplexing loss. It is shown that the new transmission protocol offers significant performance advantages over conventional protocols, especially when the interference between the two relays is sufficiently strong.Comment: To appear in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Differential Distributed Space-Time Coding with Imperfect Synchronization

Differential distributed space-time coding (D-DSTC) has been considered to improve both diversity and data-rate in cooperative communications in the absence of channel information. However, conventionally, it is assumed that relays are perfectly synchronized in the symbol level. In practice, this assumption is easily violated due to the distributed nature of the relay networks. This paper proposes a new differential encoding and decoding process for D-DSTC systems with two relays. The proposed method is robust against synchronization errors and does not require any channel information at the destination. Moreover, the maximum possible diversity and symbol-by-symbol decoding are attained. Simulation results are provided to show the performance of the proposed method for various synchronization errors and the fact that our algorithm is not sensitive to synchronization error.Comment: to appear in IEEE Globecom, 201

End-to-End Joint Antenna Selection Strategy and Distributed Compress and Forward Strategy for Relay Channels

Multi-hop relay channels use multiple relay stages, each with multiple relay nodes, to facilitate communication between a source and destination. Previously, distributed space-time codes were proposed to maximize the achievable diversity-multiplexing tradeoff, however, they fail to achieve all the points of the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. In the presence of a low-rate feedback link from the destination to each relay stage and the source, this paper proposes an end-to-end antenna selection (EEAS) strategy as an alternative to distributed space-time codes. The EEAS strategy uses a subset of antennas of each relay stage for transmission of the source signal to the destination with amplify and forwarding at each relay stage. The subsets are chosen such that they maximize the end-to-end mutual information at the destination. The EEAS strategy achieves the corner points of the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (corresponding to maximum diversity gain and maximum multiplexing gain) and achieves better diversity gain at intermediate values of multiplexing gain, versus the best known distributed space-time coding strategies. A distributed compress and forward (CF) strategy is also proposed to achieve all points of the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff for a two-hop relay channel with multiple relay nodes.Comment: Accepted for publication in the special issue on cooperative communication in the Eurasip Journal on Wireless Communication and Networkin

Distributed Space-Time Message Relaying for Uncoded/Coded Wireless Cooperative Communications

During wireless communications, nodes can overhear other transmissions through the wireless medium, suggested by the broadcast nature of plane wave propagation, and may help to provide extra observations of the source signals to the destination. Modern research in wireless communications pays more attention to these extra observations which were formerly neglected within networks. Cooperative communication processes this abundant information existing at the surrounding nodes and retransmits towards the destination in various forms to create spatial and/or coding diversity, thereby to obtain higher throughput and reliability. The aim of this work is to design cooperative communication systems with distributed space-time block codes (DSTBC) in different relaying protocols and theoretically derive the BER performance for each scenario. The amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol is one of the most commonly used protocols at the relays. It has a low implementation complexity but with a drawback of amplifying the noise as well. We establish the derivation of the exact one-integral expression of the average BER performance of this system, folloby a novel approximation method based on the series expansion. An emerging technology, soft decode-and-forward (SDF), has been presented to combine the desired features of AF and DF: soft signal representation in AF and channel coding gain in DF. In the SDF protocol, after decoding, relays transmit the soft-information, which represents the reliability of symbols passed by the decoder, to the destination. Instead of keeping the source node idling when the relays transmit as in the traditional SDF system, we let the source transmit hard information and cooperate with the relays using DSTBC. By theoretically deriving the detection performance at the destination by either using or not using the DSTBC, we make comparisons among three SDF systems. Interesting results have been shown, together with Monte-Carlo simulations, to illustrate that our proposed one-relay and two-relay SDF & DSTBC systems outperform traditional soft relaying for most of the cases. Finally, these analytic results also provide a way to implement the optimal power allocation between the source and the relay or between relays, which is illustrated in the line model

Distributed Linear Convolutional Space-Time Coding for Two-Relay Full-Duplex Asynchronous Cooperative Networks

In this paper, a two-relay full-duplex asynchronous cooperative network with the amplify-and-forward (AF) protocol is considered. We propose two distributed space-time coding schemes for the cases with and without cross-talks, respectively. In the first case, each relay can receive the signal sent by the other through the cross-talk link. We first study the feasibility of cross-talk cancellation in this network and show that the cross-talk interference cannot be removed well. For this reason, we design space-time codes by utilizing the cross-talk signals instead of removing them. In the other case, the self-coding is realized individually through the loop channel at each relay node and the signals from the two relay nodes form a space-time code. The achievable cooperative diversity of both cases is investigated and the conditions to achieve full cooperative diversity are presented. Simulation results verify the theoretical analysis.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, accepted by IEEE transactions on wireless communication