Deterministic Capacity of MIMO Relay Networks

The deterministic capacity of a relay network is the capacity of a network when relays are restricted to transmitting \emph{reliable} information, that is, (asymptotically) deterministic function of the source message. In this paper it is shown that the deterministic capacity of a number of MIMO relay networks can be found in the low power regime where \SNR\to0. This is accomplished through deriving single letter upper bounds and finding the limit of these as \SNR\to0. The advantage of this technique is that it overcomes the difficulty of finding optimum distributions for mutual information.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

The Impact of Channel Feedback on Opportunistic Relay Selection for Hybrid-ARQ in Wireless Networks

This paper presents a decentralized relay selection protocol for a dense wireless network and describes channel feedback strategies that improve its performance. The proposed selection protocol supports hybrid automatic-repeat-request transmission where relays forward parity information to the destination in the event of a decoding error. Channel feedback is employed for refining the relay selection process and for selecting an appropriate transmission mode in a proposed adaptive modulation transmission framework. An approximation of the throughput of the proposed adaptive modulation strategy is presented, and the dependence of the throughput on system parameters such as the relay contention probability and the adaptive modulation switching point is illustrated via maximization of this approximation. Simulations show that the throughput of the proposed selection strategy is comparable to that yielded by a centralized selection approach that relies on geographic information.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figures, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, revised March 200

Joint Source-Channel Cooperative Transmission over Relay-Broadcast Networks

Reliable transmission of a discrete memoryless source over a multiple-relay relay-broadcast network is considered. Motivated by sensor network applications, it is assumed that the relays and the destinations all have access to side information correlated with the underlying source signal. Joint source-channel cooperative transmission is studied in which the relays help the transmission of the source signal to the destinations by using both their overheard signals, as in the classical channel cooperation scenario, as well as the available correlated side information. Decode-and-forward (DF) based cooperative transmission is considered in a network of multiple relay terminals and two different achievability schemes are proposed: i) a regular encoding and sliding-window decoding scheme without explicit source binning at the encoder, and ii) a semi-regular encoding and backward decoding scheme with binning based on the side information statistics. It is shown that both of these schemes lead to the same source-channel code rate, which is shown to be the "source-channel capacity" in the case of i) a physically degraded relay network in which the side information signals are also degraded in the same order as the channel; and ii) a relay-broadcast network in which all the terminals want to reconstruct the source reliably, while at most one of them can act as a relay.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 201

Bilayer Low-Density Parity-Check Codes for Decode-and-Forward in Relay Channels

This paper describes an efficient implementation of binning for the relay channel using low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes. We devise bilayer LDPC codes to approach the theoretically promised rate of the decode-and-forward relaying strategy by incorporating relay-generated information bits in specially designed bilayer graphical code structures. While conventional LDPC codes are sensitively tuned to operate efficiently at a certain channel parameter, the proposed bilayer LDPC codes are capable of working at two different channel parameters and two different rates: that at the relay and at the destination. To analyze the performance of bilayer LDPC codes, bilayer density evolution is devised as an extension of the standard density evolution algorithm. Based on bilayer density evolution, a design methodology is developed for the bilayer codes in which the degree distribution is iteratively improved using linear programming. Further, in order to approach the theoretical decode-and-forward rate for a wide range of channel parameters, this paper proposes two different forms bilayer codes, the bilayer-expurgated and bilayer-lengthened codes. It is demonstrated that a properly designed bilayer LDPC code can achieve an asymptotic infinite-length threshold within 0.24 dB gap to the Shannon limits of two different channels simultaneously for a wide range of channel parameters. By practical code construction, finite-length bilayer codes are shown to be able to approach within a 0.6 dB gap to the theoretical decode-and-forward rate of the relay channel at a block length of $10^5$ and a bit-error probability (BER) of $10^{-4}$. Finally, it is demonstrated that a generalized version of the proposed bilayer code construction is applicable to relay networks with multiple relays.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. Info. Theor

Cooperative Strategies for the Half-Duplex Gaussian Parallel Relay Channel: Simultaneous Relaying versus Successive Relaying

This study investigates the problem of communication for a network composed of two half-duplex parallel relays with additive white Gaussian noise. Two protocols, i.e., \emph{Simultaneous} and \emph{Successive} relaying, associated with two possible relay orderings are proposed. The simultaneous relaying protocol is based on \emph{Dynamic Decode and Forward (DDF)} scheme. For the successive relaying protocol: (i) a \emph{Non-Cooperative} scheme based on the \emph{Dirty Paper Coding (DPC)}, and (ii) a \emph{Cooperative} scheme based on the \emph{Block Markov Encoding (BME)} are considered. Furthermore, the composite scheme of employing BME at one relay and DPC at another always achieves a better rate when compared to the \emph{Cooperative} scheme. A \emph{"Simultaneous-Successive Relaying based on Dirty paper coding scheme" (SSRD)} is also proposed. The optimum ordering of the relays and hence the capacity of the half-duplex Gaussian parallel relay channel in the low and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) scenarios is derived. In the low SNR scenario, it is revealed that under certain conditions for the channel coefficients, the ratio of the achievable rate of the simultaneous relaying based on DDF to the cut-set bound tends to be 1. On the other hand, as SNR goes to infinity, it is proved that successive relaying, based on the DPC, asymptotically achieves the capacity of the network.Comment: 37 pages, 10 figures, submitted to IEEE transaction on Information Theory in October 200

Design of low-density parity-check codes in relay channels

Recent breakthroughs in forward error correction, in the form of low-density parity-check (LDPC) and turbo codes, have seen near Shannon limit performances especially for pointto- point channels. The construction of capacity-achieving codes in relay channels, for LDPC codes in particular, is currently the subject of intense interest in the research and development community. This thesis adds to this field, developing methods and supporting theory in designing capacity-achieving LDPC codes for decode-and-forward (DF) schemes in relay channels. In the first part of the thesis, new theoretical results toward optimizing the achievable rate of DF scheme in half-duplex relay channels under simplified and pragmatic conditions (equal power or equal time allocation) are developed. We derive the closed-form solutions for the optimum parameters (time or power) that maximize the achievable rates of the DF scheme in the half-duplex relay channel. We also derive the closed-form expression for the DF achievable rates under these simplified and pragmatic conditions. The second part of the thesis is dedicated to study the problem of designing several classes of capacity-achieving LDPC codes in relay channels. First, a new ensemble of LDPC codes, termed multi-edge-type bilayer-expurgated LDPC (MET-BE-LDPC) codes, is introduced to closely approach the theoretical limit of the DF scheme in the relay channel. We propose two design strategies for optimizing MET-BE-LDPC codes; the bilayer approach and the bilayer approach with intermediate rates. Second, we address the issue of constructing capacity-achieving distributed LDPC codes in the multiple-access and two-way relay channels, with broadcast transmissions and time-division multiple accesses. We propose a new methodology to asymptotically optimize the code’s degree distribution when different segments within the distributed codeword have been transmitted through separate channels and experienced distinct signal-to-noise ratio in the relay system. Third, we investigate the use of LDPC codes under the soft-decode-and forward (SDF) scheme in the half-duplex relay channel. We introduce the concept of a K-layer doping matrix that enables one to design the rate-compatible (RC) LDPC code with a lower triangular parity-check matrix, subsequently allowing the additional parity bits to be linearly and systematically encoded at the relay. We then present the soft-decoding and soft-re-encoding algorithms for the designed RC-LDPC code so that the relay can forward soft messages to the destination when the relay fails to decode the source’s messages. Special attention is given to the detection problem of the SDF scheme. We propose a novel method, which we refer to as soft fading, to compute the log-likelihood ratio of the received signal at the destination for the SDF scheme