Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Near-Capacity Irregular Convolutional Coded Cooperative Differential Linear Dispersion Codes Using Multiple-Symbol Differential Detection

We propose a novel near-capacity Multiple-Symbol Differential Decoding (MSDD) aided cooperative Differential Linear Dispersion Code (DLDC) scheme, which exhibits a high grade of system design flexibility in terms of the choice of activated relays and the DLDC's rate allocation. More specifically, the system has the freedom to activate a range of DLDCs depending on both the number of relays available in the network, as well as on their position, throughput and complexity considerations

Fair and optimal resource allocation in wireless sensor networks

There is a large amount of research in wireless networks focuses on optimization of either network routing and power control alone. In contrast, this work aims at jointly optimizing the transmission power and routing path selection in order to optimize allocation of resources in interference constrained wireless environment. Moreover, we consider a multipath routing where multiple alternative paths are employed to transmit data between the end nodes. One of modern communication techniques that it applies to a network coding, though not explicitly implemented in this work. The proposed approach is first analyzed theoretically using Lagrangian optimization for a three-node scenario. We analyze this basic scenario, as it is essential for development of the overall multi-path routing schemes for multi-hop networks. The optimal solution for the three-node topology is replicated throughout the network to converge to a network-level solution. In contrast to existing studies, we explicitly consider interference from adjacent links, which varies with traffic flow thus optimizing the routing, and flow control decisions. The results and conclusions provide guidance as to the optimum routing decisions and a corresponding theoretical performance limits. The optimization of the throughput of the wireless network scenario is considered as a multi-variable optimization problem subject to flow and power constraints. Numerical analysis performed in Matlab-Simulink indicates that, given loose outage constraints, an optimal trade-off between the channel parameters renders optimum results even when the gain of the channel varies with time. The theoretical analysis and simulations demonstrate and validate that the channel capacity and efficiency are maximized when the routing decisions consider the network performance trade-offs. Next, the proposed routing and power control scheme is experimentally evaluated in hardware using universal software radio peripheral (USRP2). The USRP testbed utilizes the proposed multi-variable optimization algorithm. The communication system is implemented using GNU Radio software where the physical layer employs two direct-spread spectrum variants: (a) binary phase shift keying (DS-BPSK) and (b) orthogonal frequency division modulation (DS-OFDM) schemes. The experimental results are compared with the simulation results --Abstract, page iii

Code-rate-optimized differentially modulated near-capacity cooperation

It is widely recognized that half-duplex-relay-aided differential decode-and-forward (DDF) cooperative transmission schemes are capable of achieving a cooperative diversity gain, while circumventing the potentially excessive-complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, especially in mobile environments. However, when a cooperative wireless communication system is designed to approach the maximum achievable spectral efficiency by taking the cooperation-induced multiplexing loss into account, it is not obvious whether or not the relay-aided system becomes superior to its direct-transmission based counterpart, especially, when advanced channel coding techniques are employed. Furthermore, the optimization of the transmit-interval durations required by the source and relay is an open issue, which has not been well understood in the context of half-duplex relaying schemes. Hence, we first find the optimum transmission duration, which is proportional to the adaptive channel-code rate of the source and relay in the context of Code-Rate-Optimized (CRO) TDMA-based DDF-aided half-duplex systems for the sake of maximizing the achievable network throughput. Then, we investigate the benefits of introducing cooperative mechanisms into wireless networks, which may be approached in the context of the proposed CRO cooperative system both from a pure capacity perspective and from the practical perspective of approaching the Discrete-input Continuous-output Memoryless Channel (DCMC) capacity with the aid of the proposed Irregular Distributed Differential (IrDD) coding aided scheme. In order to achieve a near-capacity performance at a low-complexity, an adaptive-window-duration based Multiple-Symbol Differential Sphere Detection (MSDSD) scheme is employed in the iterative detection aided receiver. Specifically, upon using the proposed near-capacity system design, the IrDD coding scheme devised becomes capable of performing within about 1.8 dB from the corresponding single-relay-aided DDF cooperative system’s DCMC capacity

Relay Selection for Two-way Relaying with Amplify-and-Forward Protocols

In this paper, we propose a relay selection amplify-and-forward (RS-AF) protocol in general bi-directional relay networks with two sources and $N$ relays. In the proposed scheme, the two sources first transmit to all the relays simultaneously, and then a single relay with a minimum sum symbol error rate (SER) will be selected to broadcast the received signals back to both sources. To facilitate the selection process, we propose a simple sub-optimal Min-Max criterion for relay selection, where a single relay which minimizes the maximum SER of two source nodes will be selected. Simulation results show that the proposed Min-Max selection has almost the same performance as the optimal selection with lower complexity. We also present a simple asymptotic SER expression and make comparison with the conventional all-participate amplify-and-forward (AP-AF) relaying scheme. The analytical results are verified through simulations. To improve the system performance, optimum power allocation (OPA) between the sources and the relay is determined based on the asymptotic SER. Simulation results indicate that the proposed RS-AF scheme with OPA yields considerable performance improvement over an equal power allocation (EPA) scheme, specially with large number of relay nodes.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure