Design and Performance Analysis of Efficient Cooperative Wireless Communication Systems

Cooperative communication has recently become a key technology for modern wireless networks such as 3GPP long-term evolution and WiMAX, because in such networks the transmission rate, the communication reliability, and coverage problems could be improved in a cost-effective manner. This, however, faces many design challenges. First, cooperative transmission typically involves a relaying phase which requires extra resources. This may cause a reduction in the spectral efficiency. Second, extra control signaling increases the complexity of operation, which may limit practical implementation. In addition, a wireless channel is time-varying, mainly due to the multipath propagation. As a result, a careful design of efficient cooperative communication systems is required, not only to enhance the spectral efficiency and maintain the quality-of-service (QoS), but also to be practical. In this dissertation, we aim to address the challenges imposed by cooperative communication and wireless transmission, and design the efficient and distributed systems which can be practically implemented in existing wireless systems. The research work is divided into two main topics: 1) adaptive cooperative wireless systems with variable-rate transmission, and 2) cooperative wireless systems with a power consumption constraint. The first topic investigates how the spectral efficiency of cooperative wireless communication systems can be improved while maintaining the QoS in terms of bit error rate and outage probability. The spectral efficiency enhancement is achieved by using three techniques: adaptivity over the relay node (i.e., relay node is active or not), adaptivity over the modulation mode, and relay selection. Based on that, we propose several adaptive cooperative schemes for both the decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF) protocols. To evaluate these schemes, we provide performance analysis in terms of average spectral efficiency, average bit error rate (ABER), and outage probability over Rayleigh fading channels. We start with the single-relay cooperative system using DF protocol, in which two adaptive cooperative schemes with variable-rate transmission are proposed. The first scheme, called the minimum error rate scheme (MERS), aims to exploit the transmit diversity to improve the bit error rate. By trading the multiplexing gain against the diversity gain, we propose the second scheme, called the maximum spectral efficiency scheme (MSES), in which cooperative transmission is avoided whenever it is not beneficial. The MERS improves the ABER significantly and achieves equal or better average spectral efficiency compared to the fixed (i.e., non-adaptive) relaying scheme. In contrast, the MSES provides the best average spectral efficiency due to its ability to not only adapt to the channel variation but also to switch between cooperative and non-cooperative transmissions. To further increase the spectral efficiency, we then propose the third scheme, called variable-rate based relay selection (VRRS) scheme, in which a relay node is selected from among the available relay nodes, based on a predefined criterion. Furthermore, we propose two AF adaptive cooperative schemes, mainly to enhance the spectral efficiency. In the first scheme, we introduce a generalized switching policy (GSP) for a single-relay cooperative wireless system that exploits the variable-rate transmission and useful cooperative regions. The second scheme, called the AF efficient relay selection (AFERS) scheme, extends the GSP to also consider the relay selection technique. Analytical and simulation results verify that the AFERS scheme not only outperforms conventional direct transmission in terms of the average spectral efficiency, but also the AF fixed relaying and the outage-based AF adaptive cooperative scheme. The second topic investigates the fair power consumption of the relay nodes for AF cooperative wireless communication systems. The fairness is defined as to achieve equal power consumption over the relay nodes. We focus on how the relay selection process can be controlled in a distributed manner so that the power consumption of the relay nodes can be included in relay selection. We first introduce a simple closed-form expression for the weight coefficient used in order to achieve the considered fairness that depends only on the local average channel conditions of the relay path. We then derive closed-form expressions of the weighted outage probability and ABER and show that our proposed strategy not only has less complexity than the conventional centralized one but also provides better accuracy in distributing the total consumed power equally among the relay nodes without affecting the performance

Wireless industrial monitoring and control networks: the journey so far and the road ahead

While traditional wired communication technologies have played a crucial role in industrial monitoring and control networks over the past few decades, they are increasingly proving to be inadequate to meet the highly dynamic and stringent demands of today’s industrial applications, primarily due to the very rigid nature of wired infrastructures. Wireless technology, however, through its increased pervasiveness, has the potential to revolutionize the industry, not only by mitigating the problems faced by wired solutions, but also by introducing a completely new class of applications. While present day wireless technologies made some preliminary inroads in the monitoring domain, they still have severe limitations especially when real-time, reliable distributed control operations are concerned. This article provides the reader with an overview of existing wireless technologies commonly used in the monitoring and control industry. It highlights the pros and cons of each technology and assesses the degree to which each technology is able to meet the stringent demands of industrial monitoring and control networks. Additionally, it summarizes mechanisms proposed by academia, especially serving critical applications by addressing the real-time and reliability requirements of industrial process automation. The article also describes certain key research problems from the physical layer communication for sensor networks and the wireless networking perspective that have yet to be addressed to allow the successful use of wireless technologies in industrial monitoring and control networks

Separation Framework: An Enabler for Cooperative and D2D Communication for Future 5G Networks

Soaring capacity and coverage demands dictate that future cellular networks need to soon migrate towards ultra-dense networks. However, network densification comes with a host of challenges that include compromised energy efficiency, complex interference management, cumbersome mobility management, burdensome signaling overheads and higher backhaul costs. Interestingly, most of the problems, that beleaguer network densification, stem from legacy networks' one common feature i.e., tight coupling between the control and data planes regardless of their degree of heterogeneity and cell density. Consequently, in wake of 5G, control and data planes separation architecture (SARC) has recently been conceived as a promising paradigm that has potential to address most of aforementioned challenges. In this article, we review various proposals that have been presented in literature so far to enable SARC. More specifically, we analyze how and to what degree various SARC proposals address the four main challenges in network densification namely: energy efficiency, system level capacity maximization, interference management and mobility management. We then focus on two salient features of future cellular networks that have not yet been adapted in legacy networks at wide scale and thus remain a hallmark of 5G, i.e., coordinated multipoint (CoMP), and device-to-device (D2D) communications. After providing necessary background on CoMP and D2D, we analyze how SARC can particularly act as a major enabler for CoMP and D2D in context of 5G. This article thus serves as both a tutorial as well as an up to date survey on SARC, CoMP and D2D. Most importantly, the article provides an extensive outlook of challenges and opportunities that lie at the crossroads of these three mutually entangled emerging technologies.Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 201