Multi-Antenna Cooperative Wireless Systems: A Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff Perspective

We consider a general multiple antenna network with multiple sources, multiple destinations and multiple relays in terms of the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT). We examine several subcases of this most general problem taking into account the processing capability of the relays (half-duplex or full-duplex), and the network geometry (clustered or non-clustered). We first study the multiple antenna relay channel with a full-duplex relay to understand the effect of increased degrees of freedom in the direct link. We find DMT upper bounds and investigate the achievable performance of decode-and-forward (DF), and compress-and-forward (CF) protocols. Our results suggest that while DF is DMT optimal when all terminals have one antenna each, it may not maintain its good performance when the degrees of freedom in the direct link is increased, whereas CF continues to perform optimally. We also study the multiple antenna relay channel with a half-duplex relay. We show that the half-duplex DMT behavior can significantly be different from the full-duplex case. We find that CF is DMT optimal for half-duplex relaying as well, and is the first protocol known to achieve the half-duplex relay DMT. We next study the multiple-access relay channel (MARC) DMT. Finally, we investigate a system with a single source-destination pair and multiple relays, each node with a single antenna, and show that even under the idealistic assumption of full-duplex relays and a clustered network, this virtual multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system can never fully mimic a real MIMO DMT. For cooperative systems with multiple sources and multiple destinations the same limitation remains to be in effect.Comment: version 1: 58 pages, 15 figures, Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, version 2: Final version, to appear IEEE IT, title changed, extra figures adde

Outage Performance of Two-Hop OFDM Systems with Spatially Random Decode-and-Forward Relays

In this paper, we analyze the outage performance of different multicarrier relay selection schemes for two-hop orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems in a Poisson field of relays. In particular, special emphasis is placed on decode-and-forward (DF) relay systems, equipped with bulk and per-subcarrier selection schemes, respectively. The exact expressions for outage probability are derived in integrals for general cases. In addition, asymptotic expressions for outage probability in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region in the finite circle relay distribution region are determined in closed forms for both relay selection schemes. Also, the outage probabilities for free space in the infinite relay distribution region are derived in closed forms. Meanwhile, a series of important properties related to cooperative systems in random networks are investigated, including diversity, outage probability ratio of two selection schemes and optimization of the number of subcarriers in terms of system throughput. All analysis is numerically verified by simulations. Finally, a framework for analyzing the outage performance of OFDM systems with spatially random relays is constructed, which can be easily modified to analyze other similar cases with different forwarding protocols, location distributions and/or channel conditions

Towards the Optimal Amplify-and-Forward Cooperative Diversity Scheme

In a slow fading channel, how to find a cooperative diversity scheme that achieves the transmit diversity bound is still an open problem. In fact, all previously proposed amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) schemes do not improve with the number of relays in terms of the diversity multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) for multiplexing gains r higher than 0.5. In this work, we study the class of slotted amplify-and-forward (SAF) schemes. We first establish an upper bound on the DMT for any SAF scheme with an arbitrary number of relays N and number of slots M. Then, we propose a sequential SAF scheme that can exploit the potential diversity gain in the high multiplexing gain regime. More precisely, in certain conditions, the sequential SAF scheme achieves the proposed DMT upper bound which tends to the transmit diversity bound when M goes to infinity. In particular, for the two-relay case, the three-slot sequential SAF scheme achieves the proposed upper bound and outperforms the two-relay non-orthorgonal amplify-and-forward (NAF) scheme of Azarian et al. for multiplexing gains r < 2/3. Numerical results reveal a significant gain of our scheme over the previously proposed AF schemes, especially in high spectral efficiency and large network size regime.Comment: 30 pages, 11 figures, submitted to IEEE trans. IT, revised versio

Outage analysis of superposition modulation aided network coded cooperation in the presence of network coding noise

We consider a network, where multiple sourcedestination pairs communicate with the aid of a half-duplex relay node (RN), which adopts decode-forward (DF) relaying and superposition-modulation (SPM) for combining the signals transmitted by the source nodes (SNs) and then forwards the composite signal to all the destination nodes (DNs). Each DN extracts the signals transmitted by its own SN from the composite signal by subtracting the signals overheard from the unwanted SNs. We derive tight lower-bounds for the outage probability for transmission over Rayleigh fading channels and invoke diversity combining at the DNs, which is validated by simulation for both the symmetric and the asymmetric network configurations. For the high signal-to-noise ratio regime, we derive both an upperbound as well as a lower-bound for the outage performance and analyse the achievable diversity gain. It is revealed that a diversity order of 2 is achieved, regardless of the number of SN-DN pairs in the network. We also highlight the fact that the outage performance is dominated by the quality of the worst overheated link, because it contributes most substantially to the network coding noise. Finally, we use the lower bound for designing a relay selection scheme for the proposed SPM based network coded cooperative communication (SPM-NC-CC) system.<br/