Analysis of hybrid-ARQ based relaying protocols under modulation constraints

In a seminal paper published in 2001, Caire and Tuninetti derived an information theoretic bound on the throughput of hybrid-ARQ in the presence of block fading. However, the results placed no constraints on the modulation used, and therefore the input to the channel was Gaussian. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the impact of modulation constraints on the throughput of hybrid-ARQ in a block fading environment. First, we consider the impact of modulation constraints on information outage probability for a block fading channel with a fixed length codeword. Then, we consider the effect of modulation constraints upon the throughput of hybrid-ARQ, where the rate of the codeword varies depending on the instantaneous channel conditions. These theoretical bounds are compared against the simulated performance of HSDPA, a newly standardized hybrid-ARQ protocol that uses QPSK and 16-QAM bit interleaved turbo-coded modulation. The results indicate how much of the difference between HSDPA and the previous unconstrained modulation bound is due to the use of the turbo-code and how much is due to the modulation constraints. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Hybrid ARQ with parallel and serial concatenated convolutional codes for next generation wireless communications

This research focuses on evaluating the currently used FEC encoding-decoding schemes and improving the performance of error control systems by incorporating these schemes in a hybrid FEC-ARQ environment. Beginning with an overview of wireless communications and the various ARQ protocols, the thesis provides an in-depth explanation of convolutional encoding and Viterbi decoding, turbo (PCCC) and serial concatenated convolutional (SCCC) encoding with their respective MAP decoding strategies.;A type-II hybrid ARQ scheme with SCCCs is proposed for the first time and is a major contribution of this thesis. A vast improvement is seen in the BER performance of the successive individual FEC schemes discussed above. Also, very high throughputs can be achieved when these schemes are incorporated in an adaptive type-II hybrid ARQ system.;Finally, the thesis discusses the equivalence of the PCCCs and the SCCCs and proposes a technique to generate a hybrid code using both schemes

Turbo Packet Combining for Broadband Space-Time BICM Hybrid-ARQ Systems with Co-Channel Interference

In this paper, efficient turbo packet combining for single carrier (SC) broadband multiple-input--multiple-output (MIMO) hybrid--automatic repeat request (ARQ) transmission with unknown co-channel interference (CCI) is studied. We propose a new frequency domain soft minimum mean square error (MMSE)-based signal level combining technique where received signals and channel frequency responses (CFR)s corresponding to all retransmissions are used to decode the data packet. We provide a recursive implementation algorithm for the introduced scheme, and show that both its computational complexity and memory requirements are quite insensitive to the ARQ delay, i.e., maximum number of ARQ rounds. Furthermore, we analyze the asymptotic performance, and show that under a sum-rank condition on the CCI MIMO ARQ channel, the proposed packet combining scheme is not interference-limited. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the gains offered by the proposed technique.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, and 2 table

Optimization of communication data rates under fading conditions

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Collaborative HARQ Schemes for Cooperative Diversity Communications in Wireless Networks

Wireless technology is experiencing spectacular developments, due to the emergence of interactive and digital multimedia applications as well as rapid advances in the highly integrated systems. For the next-generation mobile communication systems, one can expect wireless connectivity between any devices at any time and anywhere with a range of multimedia contents. A key requirement in such systems is the availability of high-speed and robust communication links. Unfortunately, communications over wireless channels inherently suffer from a number of fundamental physical limitations, such as multipath fading, scarce radio spectrum, and limited battery power supply for mobile devices. Cooperative diversity (CD) technology is a promising solution for future wireless communication systems to achieve broader coverage and to mitigate wireless channels’ impairments without the need to use high power at the transmitter. In general, cooperative relaying systems have a source node multicasting a message to a number of cooperative relays, which in turn resend a processed version message to an intended destination node. The destination node combines the signal received from the relays, and takes into account the source’s original signal to decode the message. The CD communication systems exploit two fundamental features of the wireless medium: its broadcast nature and its ability to achieve diversity through independent channels. A variety of relaying protocols have been considered and utilized in cooperative wireless networks. Amplify and forward (AAF) and decode and forward (DAF) are two popular protocols, frequently used in the cooperative systems. In the AAF mode, the relay amplifies the received signal prior to retransmission. In the DAF mode, the relay fully decodes the received signal, re-encodes and forwards it to the destination. Due to the retransmission without decoding, AAF has the shortcoming that noise accumulated in the received signal is amplified at the transmission. DAF suffers from decoding errors that can lead to severe error propagation. To further enhance the quality of service (QoS) of CD communication systems, hybrid Automatic Repeat-reQuest (HARQ) protocols have been proposed. Thus, if the destination requires an ARQ retransmission, it could come from one of relays rather than the source node. This thesis proposes an improved HARQ scheme with an adaptive relaying protocol (ARP). Focusing on the HARQ as a central theme, we start by introducing the concept of ARP. Then we use it as the basis for designing three types of HARQ schemes, denoted by HARQ I-ARP, HARQ II-ARP and HARQ III-ARP. We describe the relaying protocols, (both AAF and DAF), and their operations, including channel access between the source and relay, the feedback scheme, and the combining methods at the receivers. To investigate the benefits of the proposed HARQ scheme, we analyze its frame error rate (FER) and throughput performance over a quasi-static fading channel. We can compare these with the reference methods, HARQ with AAF (HARQ-AAF) and HARQ with perfect distributed turbo codes (DTC), for which correct decoding is always assumed at the relay (HARQ-perfect DTC). It is shown that the proposed HARQ-ARP scheme can always performs better than the HARQ-AAF scheme. As the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the channel between the source and relay increases, the performance of the proposed HARQ-ARP scheme approaches that of the HARQ-perfect DTC scheme

Relay communications over frequency-selective fading channels

Wireless communications over long distances can be assisted by a third radio acting as a relay. If the relay is placed close to the source, then the source-relay link will be characterized as a fairly benign additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. However, the long distance link from relay to destination is susceptible to frequency-selective fading. This thesis explores the design and analysis of a particular relay communication system characterized by a low power source, a relay that is close to the source, and a frequency-selective channel from relay to destination. Because the direct link from source to destination is very weak, it is not exploited, but rather communications is via a traditional two-hop process.;Link design is based on the high speed download packet access (HSDPA) standard, which uses a combination of turbo coding, hybrid-ARQ, and multicode CDMA. To provide further diversity, the relay-destination link uses a secondary spreading code, rake reception, and multiple receive antennas. An extensive analysis was conducted to study the influence of a wide variety of link configurations and channel conditions. The study was accelerated through the use of a quasi-analytical approach based on the concept of information-outage, which allows the link to be simulated without requiring a turbo decoder