Performance analysis for industrial wireless networks

Industrial wireless networks operate in harsher and noisier environments compared to traditional wireless networks, while demanding high reliability and low latency. These requirements, combined with the constant need for better coverage, higher data rates and overall seamless user experience call for a paradigm shift in communication in regards to the previous generations of technologies used. Cooperative diversity is one such approach. The main focus of this thesis is on the performance analysis of cooperative wireless networks set in industrial environments – where the network, apart from additive white Gaussian noise, is subject to multipath fading and shadowing, and/or temporary random blockage effects. In these scenarios, in order to achieve specific performance metrics such as error rates or outage probabilities, existing cooperative strategies are aided by protocols in the channel between the cooperating nodes. Moreover, pair-wise analysis investigates the correlation of multiple data flows. Building upon existing repetition protocols, outage performance of a network subject to fading and shadowing is observed, and the effects of fading and shadowing severity, network dimension, average signal-to-noise ratio values and packet length are discussed. Special cases are also observed, in which the composite fading channel is reduced to several familiar propagation environments, unifying the analysis. Afterwards, the analysis of more complex protocols is presented, taking into account random blockage in the channels between cooperating nodes. A novel, threshold-based internode protocol is introduced, which improves performance by listening to the transmissions and choosing whether to send a packet immediately or after a waiting period. As these two periods are close, the effect of temporal correlation is also investigated. Apart from the exact outage probability expressions, simpler asymptotic expressions, with and without blockage, are derived as well, giving a better insight on the network behaviour at high average signal-to-noise ratio regimes. Both outage probability and packet error rate can be also improved by adding automatic repeat request schemes in the channel between cooperating nodes, which again utilize the internode channels by re-sending data until it can be successfully decoded. Error-free communication can be achieved, but at a delay cost. Nevertheless, a trade-off between performance gains and delays remains, and can therefore be used for designing wireless networks with different requirements – error-free or low-latency. Finally, joint outage performance is investigated. Using a generic approach, which can be applied to any sort of data where multiple sources are communicating over wireless networks, pair-wise behaviour is investigated. As a result, any multi-route diversity type of scheme will have this sort of behaviour, since particular point-to-point relay links are being shared by source nodes. This in turn means that the performance of those flows will be correlated. For higher layers, there is a difference in the behaviour, meaning that when errors are correlated, data flows start behaving correlated as well. As a result, negative acknowledgements may start to correlate as well. All of this contributes to the network behaving in a correlated way, i.e., when something happens, it tends to happen to more than one data flow

Truncated-ARQ aided adaptive network coding for cooperative two-way relaying networks: cross-layer design and analysis

Network Coding (NC) constitutes a promising technique of improving the throughput of relay-aided networks. In this context, we propose a cross-layer design for both amplifyand- forward (AF-) and decode-and-forward two-way relaying (DF-TWR) based on the NC technique invoked for improving the achievable throughput under specific Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as the maximum affordable delay and error rate.We intrinsically amalgamate adaptive Analog Network Coding (ANC) and Network Coded Modulation (NCM) with truncated Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) operating at the different OSI layers. At the data-link layer, we design a pair of improved NC-based ARQ strategies based on the Stop-andwait and the Selective-repeat ARQ protocols. At the physical layer, adaptive ANC/NCM are invoked based on our approximate packet error ratio (PER). We demonstrate that the adaptive ANC design can be readily amalgamated with the proposed protocols. However, adaptive NC-QAM suffers from an SNR-loss, when the transmit rates of the pair of downlink (DL) channels spanning from the relay to the pair of destinations are different. Therefore we develop a novel transmission strategy for jointly selecting the optimal constellation sizes for both of the relay-to-destination links that have to be adapted to both pair of channel conditions. Finally, we analyze the attainable throughput, demonstrating that our truncated ARQ-aided adaptive ANC/NCM schemes attain considerable throughput gains over the schemes dispensing with ARQ, whilst our proposed scheme is capable of supporting bidirectional NC scenarios

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

Towards Context Information-based High-Performing Connectivity in Internet of Vehicle Communications

Internet-of-vehicles (IoV) is one of the most important use cases in the fifth generation (5G) of wireless networks and beyond. Here, IoV communications refer to two types of scenarios: serving the in-vehicle users with moving relays (MRs); and supporting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications for, e.g., connected vehicle functionalities. Both of them can be achieved by transceivers on top of vehicles with growing demand for quality of service (QoS), such as spectrum efficiency, peak data rate, and coverage probability. However, the performance of MRs and V2X is limited by challenges such as the inaccurate prediction/estimation of the channel state information (CSI), beamforming mismatch, and blockages. Knowing the environment and utilizing such context information to assist communication could alleviate these issues. This thesis investigates various context information-based performance enhancement schemes for IoV networks, with main contributions listed as follows.In order to mitigate the channel aging issue, i.e., the CSI becomes inaccurate soon at high speeds, the first part of the thesis focuses on one way to increase the prediction horizon of CSI in MRs: predictor antennas (PAs). A PA system is designed as a system with two sets of antennas on the roof of a vehicle, where the PAs positioned at the front of the vehicle are used to predict the CSI observed by the receive antennas (RAs) that are aligned behind the PAs. In PA systems, however, the benefit is affected by a variety of factors. For example, 1) spatial mismatch between the point where the PA estimates the channel and the point where the RA reaches several time slots later, 2) antenna utilization efficiency of the PA, 3) temporal evolution, and 4) estimation error of the PA-base station (BS) channel. First, in Paper A, we study the PA system in the presence of the spatial mismatch problem, and propose an analytical channel model which is used for rate adaptation. In paper B, we propose different approximation schemes for the analytical investigation of PA systems, and study the effect of different parameters on the network performance. Then, involving PAs into data transmission, Paper C and Paper D analyze the outage- and the delay-limited performance of PA systems using hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ), respectively. As we show in the analytical and the simulation results in Papers C-D, the combination of PA and HARQ protocols makes it possible to improve spectral efficiency and adapt the transmission parameters to mitigate the effect of spatial mismatch. Finally, a review of PA studies in the literature, the challenges and potentials of PA as well as some to-be-solved issues are presented in Paper E.The second part of the thesis focuses on using advanced technologies to further improve the MR/IoV performance. In Paper F, a cooperative PA scheme in IoV networks is proposed to mitigate both the channel aging effect and blockage sensitivity in millimeter-wave channels by collaborative vehicles and BS handover. Then, in Paper G, we study the potentials and challenges of dynamic blockage pre-avoidance in IoV networks

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

Delay QoS Provisioning and Optimal Resource Allocation for Wireless Networks

Recent years have witnessed a significant growth in wireless communication and networking due to the exponential growth in mobile applications and smart devices, fueling unprecedented increase in both mobile data traffic and energy demand. Among such data traffic, real-time data transmissions in wireless systems require certain quality of service (QoS) constraints e.g., in terms of delay, buffer overflow or packet drop/loss probabilities, so that acceptable performance levels can be guaranteed for the end-users, especially in delay sensitive scenarios, such as live video transmission, interactive video (e.g., teleconferencing), and mobile online gaming. With this motivation, statistical queuing constraints are considered in this thesis, imposed as limitations on the decay rate of buffer overflow probabilities. In particular, the throughput and energy efficiency of different types of wireless network models are analyzed under QoS constraints, and optimal resource allocation algorithms are proposed to maximize the throughput or minimize the delay. In the first part of the thesis, the throughput and energy efficiency analysis for hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) protocols are conducted under QoS constraints. Approximations are employed for small QoS exponent values in order to obtain closed-form expressions for the throughput and energy efficiency metrics. Also, the impact of random arrivals, deadline constraints, outage probability and QoS constraints are studied. For the same system setting, the throughput of HARQ system is also analyzed using a recurrence approach, which provides more accurate results for any value of the QoS exponent. Similarly, random arrival models and deadline constraints are considered, and these results are further extended to the finite-blocklength coding regime. Next, cooperative relay networks are considered under QoS constraints. Specifically, the throughput performance in the two-hop relay channel, two-way relay channel, and multi-source multi-destination relay networks is analyzed. Finite-blocklength codes are considered for the two-hop relay channel, and optimization over the error probabilities is investigated. For the multi-source multi-destination relay network model, the throughput for both cases of with and without CSI at the transmitter sides is studied. When there is perfect CSI at the transmitter, transmission rates can be varied according to instantaneous channel conditions. When CSI is not available at the transmitter side, transmissions are performed at fixed rates, and decoding failures lead to retransmission requests via an ARQ protocol. Following the analysis of cooperative networks, the performance of both half-duplex and full-duplex operations is studied for the two-way multiple input multiple output (MIMO) system under QoS constraints. In full-duplex mode, the self-interference inflicted on the reception of a user due to simultaneous transmissions from the same user is taken into account. In this setting, the system throughput is formulated by considering the sum of the effective capacities of the users in both half-duplex and full-duplex modes. The low signal to noise ratio (SNR) regime is considered and the optimal transmission/power-allocation strategies are characterized by identifying the optimal input covariance matrices. Next, mode selection and resource allocation for device-to-device (D2D) cellular networks are studied. As the starting point, ransmission mode selection and resource allocation are analyzed for a time-division multiplexed (TDM) cellular network with one cellular user, one base station, and a pair of D2D users under rate and QoS constraints. For a more complicated setting with multiple cellular and D2D users, two joint mode selection and resource allocation algorithms are proposed. In the first algorithm, the channel allocation problem is formulated as a maximum-weight matching problem, which can be solved by employing the Hungarian algorithm. In the second algorithm, the problem is divided into three subproblems, namely user partition, power allocation and channel assignment, and a novel three-step method is proposed by combining the algorithms designed for the three subproblems. In the final part of the thesis, resource allocation algorithms are investigated for content delivery over wireless networks. Three different systems are considered. Initially, a caching algorithm is designed, which minimizes the average delay of a single-cell network. The proposed algorithm is applicable in settings with very general popularity models, with no assumptions on how file popularity varies among different users, and this algorithm is further extended to a more general setting, in which the system parameters and the distributions of channel fading change over time. Next, for D2D cellular networks operating under deadline constraints, a scheduling algorithm is designed, which manages mode selection, channel allocation and power maximization with acceptable complexity. This proposed scheduling algorithm is designed based on the convex delay cost method for a D2D cellular network with deadline constraints in an OFDMA setting. Power optimization algorithms are proposed for all possible modes, based on our utility definition. Finally, a two-step intercell interference (ICI)-aware scheduling algorithm is proposed for cloud radio access networks (C-RANs), which performs user grouping and resource allocation with the goal of minimizing delay violation probability. A novel user grouping algorithm is developed for the user grouping step, which controls the interference among the users in the same group, and the channel assignment problem is formulated as a maximum-weight matching problem in the second step, which can be solved using standard algorithms in graph theory