Mathematical optimization and signal processing techniques for cooperative wireless networks

The rapid growth of mobile users and emergence of high data rate multimedia and interactive services have resulted in a shortage of the radio spectrum. Novel solutions are therefore required for future generations of wireless networks to enhance capacity and coverage. This thesis aims at addressing this issue through the design and analysis of signal processing algorithms. In particular various resource allocation and spatial diversity techniques have been proposed within the context of wireless peer-to-peer relays and coordinated base station (BS) processing. In order to enhance coverage while providing improvement in capacity, peer-to-peer relays that share the same frequency band have been considered and various techniques for designing relay coefficients and allocating powers optimally are proposed. Both one-way and two-way amplify and forward (AF) relays have been investigated. In order to maintain fairness, a signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) balancing criterion has been adopted. In order to improve the spectrum utilization further, the relays within the context of cognitive radio network are also considered. In this case, a cognitive peer-to-peer relay network is required to achieve SINR balancing while maintaining the interference leakage to primary receiver below a certain threshold. As the spatial diversity techniques in the form of multiple-input-multipleoutput (MIMO) systems have the potential to enhance capacity significantly, the above work has been extended to peer-to-peer MIMO relay networks. Transceiver and relay beamforming design based on minimum mean-square error (MSE) criterion has been proposed. Establishing uplink downlink MSE duality, an alternating algorithm has been developed. A scenario where multiple users are served by both the BS and a MIMO relay is considered and a joint beamforming technique for the BS and the MIMO relay is proposed. With the motivation of optimising the transmission power at both the BS and the relay, an interference precoding design is presented that takes into account the knowledge of the interference caused by the relay to the users served by the BS. Recognizing joint beamformer design for multiple BSs has the ability to reduce interference in the network significantly, cooperative multi-cell beamforming design is proposed. The aim is to design multi-cell beamformers to maximize the minimum SINR of users subject to individual BS power constraints. In contrast to all works available in the literature that aimed at balancing SINR of all users in all cells to the same level, the SINRs of users in each cell is balanced and maximized at different values. This new technique takes advantage of the fact that BSs may have different available transmission powers and/or channel conditions for their users

Performance Analysis, Resource Allocation and Optimization of Cooperative Communication Systems under Generalized Fading Channels

The increasing demands for high-speed data transmission, efficient wireless access, high quality of service (QoS) and reliable network coverage with reduced power consumption impose demanding intensive research efforts on the design of novel wireless communication system architectures. A notable development in the area of communication theory is the introduction of cooperative communication systems. These technologies become promising solution for the next-generation wireless transmission systems due to their applicability in size, power, hardware and price constrained devices, such as cellular mobile devices, wireless sensors, ad-hoc networks and military communications, being able to provide, e.g., diversity gain against fading channels without the need for installing multiple antennas in a single terminal. The performance of the cooperative systems can in general be significantly increased by allocating the limited power efficiently. In this thesis, we address in detail the performance analysis, resource allocation and optimization of such cooperative communication systems under generalized fading channels. We focus first on energy-efficiency (EE) optimization and optimal power allocation (OPA) of regenerative cooperative network with spatial correlation effects under given power constraint and QoS requirement. The thesis also investigates the end-to-end performance and power allocation of a regenerative multi-relay cooperative network over non-homogeneous scattering environment, which is realistic case in practical wireless communication scenarios. Furthermore, the study investigates the end-to-end performance, OPA and energy optimization analysis under total power constraint and performance requirement of full-duplex (FD) relaying transmission scheme over asymmetric generalized fading models with relay self-interference (SI) effects.The study first focuses on exact error analysis and EE optimization of regenerative relay systems under spatial correlation effects. It first derives novel exact and asymptotic expressions for the symbol-error-rates (SERs) of M -ary quadrature amplitude and M -ary phase-shift keying (M -QAM) and (M -PSK) modulations, respectively, assuming a dual-hop decode-and-forward relay system, spatial correlation, path-loss effects and maximum-ratio-combing (MRC) at the destination. Based on this, EEoptimization and OPA are carried out under certain QoS requirement and transmit power constraints.Furthermore, the second part of the study investigates the end-to-end performance and power allocation of MRC based regenerative multi-relay cooperative system over non-homogeneous scattering environment. Novel exact and asymptotic expressions are derived for the end-to-end average SER for M -QAM and M -PSK modulations.The offered results are employed in performance investigations and power allocation formulations under total transmit power constraints.Finally, the thesis investigates outage performance, OPA and energy optimization analysis under certain system constraints for the FD and half-duplex (HD) relaying systems. Unlike the previous studies that considered the scenario of information transmission over symmetric fading conditions, in this study we considered the scenario of information transmission over the most generalized asymmetric fading environments.The obtained results indicate that depending on the severity of multipath fading, the spatial correlation between the direct and relayed paths and the relay location, the direct transmission is more energy-efficient only for rather short transmission distances and until a certain threshold. Beyond this, the system benefits substantially from the cooperative transmission approach where the cooperation gain increases as the transmission distance increases. Furthermore, the investigations on the power allocation for the multi-relay system over the generalized small-scale fading model show that substantial performance gain can be achieved by the proposed power allocation scheme over the conventional equal power allocation (EPA) scheme when the source-relay and relay-destination paths are highly unbalanced. Extensive studies on the FD relay system also show that OPA provides significant performance gain over the EPA scheme when the relay SI level is relatively strong. In addition, it is shown that the FD relaying scheme is more energy-efficient than the reference HD relaying scheme at long transmission distances and for moderate relay SI levels.In general, the investigations in this thesis provide tools, results and useful insights for implementing space-efficient, low-cost and energy-efficient cooperative networks, specifically, towards the future green communication era where the optimization of the scarce resources is critical