On the Sum of Order Statistics and Applications to Wireless Communication Systems Performances

We consider the problem of evaluating the cumulative distribution function (CDF) of the sum of order statistics, which serves to compute outage probability (OP) values at the output of generalized selection combining receivers. Generally, closed-form expressions of the CDF of the sum of order statistics are unavailable for many practical distributions. Moreover, the naive Monte Carlo (MC) method requires a substantial computational effort when the probability of interest is sufficiently small. In the region of small OP values, we propose instead two effective variance reduction techniques that yield a reliable estimate of the CDF with small computing cost. The first estimator, which can be viewed as an importance sampling estimator, has bounded relative error under a certain assumption that is shown to hold for most of the challenging distributions. An improvement of this estimator is then proposed for the Pareto and the Weibull cases. The second is a conditional MC estimator that achieves the bounded relative error property for the Generalized Gamma case and the logarithmic efficiency in the Log-normal case. Finally, the efficiency of these estimators is compared via various numerical experiments

Route diversity analyses for free-space optical wireless links within turbulent scenarios

Free-Space Optical (FSO) communications link performance is highly affected when propagating through the time-spatially variable turbulent environment. In order to improve signal reception, several mitigation techniques have been proposed and analytically investigated. This paper presents experimental results for the route diversity technique evaluations for a specific case when several diversity links intersects a common turbulent area and concurrently each passing regions with different turbulence flows

Energy Efficient Cooperative Communication

This dissertation studies several problems centered around developing a better understanding of the energy efficiency of cooperative wireless communication systems. Cooperative communication is a technique where two or more nodes in a wireless network pool their antenna resources to form a virtual antenna array . Over the last decade, researchers have shown that many of the benefits of real antenna arrays, e.g. spatial diversity, increased range, and/or decreased transmission energy, can be achieved by nodes using cooperative transmission. This dissertation extends the current body of knowledge by providing a comprehensive study of the energy efficiency of two-source cooperative transmission under differing assumptions about channel state knowledge, cooperative protocol, and node selfishness. The first part of this dissertation analyzes the effect of channel state information on the optimum energy allocation and energy efficiency of a simple cooperative transmission protocol called orthogonal amplify-and-forward (OAF). The source nodes are required to achieve a quality-of service (QoS) constraint, e.g. signal to noise ratio or outage probability, at the destination. Since a QoS constraint does not specify a unique transmit energy allocation when the nodes use OAF cooperative transmission, minimum total energy strategies are provided for both short-term and long-term QoS constraints. For independent Rayleigh fading channels, full knowledge of the channel state at both of the sources and at the destination is shown to significantly improve the energy efficiency of OAF cooperative transmission as well as direct (non-cooperative) transmission. The results also demonstrate how channel state knowledge affects the minimum total energy allocation strategy. Under identical channel state knowledge assumptions, the results demonstrate that OAF cooperative transmission tends to have better energy efficiency than direct transmission over a wide range of channel conditions. The second part of this dissertation focuses on the development of an opportunistic hybrid cooperative transmission protocol that achieves increased energy efficiency by not only optimizing the resource allocation but also by selecting the most energy efficient cooperative transmission protocol from a set of available protocols according to the current channel state. The protocols considered in the development of the hybrid cooperative transmission protocol include compress-and-forward (CF), estimate-and-forward (EF), non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward (NAF), and decode-and-forward (DF). Instantaneous capacity results are analyzed under the assumption of full channel state knowledge at both of the sources and the destination node. Numerical results are presented showing that the delay limited capacity and outage probability of the hybrid cooperative transmission protocol are superior to that of any single protocol and are also close to the cut-set bound over a wide range of channel conditions. The final part of this dissertation focuses on the issue of node selfishness in cooperative transmission. It is common to assume in networks with a central authority, e.g. military networks, that nodes will always be willing to offer help to other nodes when requested to do so. This assumption may not be valid in ad hoc networks operating without a central authority. This section of the dissertation considers the effect selfish behavior on the energy efficiency of cooperative communication systems. Using tools from non-cooperative game theory, a two-player relaying game is formulated and analyzed in non-fading and fading channel scenarios. In non-fading channels, it is shown that a cooperative equilibrium can exist between two self-interested sources given that the end of the cooperative interaction is uncertain, that the sources can achieve mutual benefit through cooperation, and that the sources are sufficiently patient in the sense that they value future payoffs. In fading channels, a cooperative conditional trigger strategy is proposed and shown to be an equilibrium of the two-player game. Sources following this strategy are shown to achieve an energy efficiency very close to that of a centrally-controlled system when they are sufficiently patient. The results in this section show that cooperation can often be established between two purely self-interested sources without the development of extrinsic incentive mechanisms like virtual currency

Capacity of and Coding for Multiple-Aperture, Wireless, Optical Communications

Thesis Supervisor: Jeffrey H. Shapiro Title: Julius A. Stratton Professor of Electrical EngineeringRefractive index turbulence causes random power fluctuations in optical communication systems, making communication through the atmosphere diffcult. This same phenomenon makes the stars twinkle at night, and pavement shimmer on a hot sum- mer day. True to the old adage, "don't put all your eggs in one basket," we examine laser communication systems that use multiple transmit and receive apertures. These apertures provide redundant replicas of the transmitted message to the receiver, each corrupted separately by the atmosphere. Reliable communication occurs when not all of these paths are deeply faded. We quantify the maximum rate of reliable communication, or capacity, and study space-time coding techniques for both direct- and coherent-detection receivers. We also experimentally verify the performance of some simple techniques for optically-preamplified, direct-detection receivers.Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenc

Capacity of and coding for multiple-aperture, wireless, optical communications

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (p. 243-249).This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Refractive index turbulence causes random power fluctuations in optical communication systems, making communication through the atmosphere difficult. This same phenomenon makes the stars twinkle at night, and pavement shimmer on a hot summer day. True to the old adage, "don't put all your eggs in one basket," we examine laser communication systems that use multiple transmit and receive apertures. These apertures provide redundant replicas of the transmitted message to the receiver, each corrupted separately by the atmosphere. Reliable communication occurs when not all of these paths are deeply faded. We quantify the maximum rate of reliable communication, or capacity, and study space-time coding techniques for both direct- and coherent-detection receivers. We also experimentally verify the performance of some simple techniques for optically-preamplified, direct-detection receivers.by Shane M. Haas.Ph.D

Ergodic Capacity and Error Performance of Spatial Diversity UWOC Systems over Generalized Gamma Turbulence Channels

In this paper, we study the ergodic capacity (EC) and average bit error rate (BER) of spatial diversity underwater wireless optical communications (UWOC) over the generalized gamma (GG) fading channels using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) direct current-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM). We derive closed-form expressions of the EC and BER for the spatial diversity UWOC with the equal gain combining (EGC) at receivers based on the approximation of the sum of independent identical distributed (i.i.d) GG random variables (RVs). Numerical results of EC and BER for QAM DCO-OFDM spatial diversity systems over GG fading channels are presented. The numerical results are shown to be closely matched by the Monte Carlo simulations, verifying the analysis. The study clearly shows the adverse effect of turbulence on the EC & BER and advantage of EGC to overcome the turbulence effect