Physical Layer Service Integration in 5G: Potentials and Challenges

High transmission rate and secure communication have been identified as the key targets that need to be effectively addressed by fifth generation (5G) wireless systems. In this context, the concept of physical-layer security becomes attractive, as it can establish perfect security using only the characteristics of wireless medium. Nonetheless, to further increase the spectral efficiency, an emerging concept, termed physical-layer service integration (PHY-SI), has been recognized as an effective means. Its basic idea is to combine multiple coexisting services, i.e., multicast/broadcast service and confidential service, into one integral service for one-time transmission at the transmitter side. This article first provides a tutorial on typical PHY-SI models. Furthermore, we propose some state-of-the-art solutions to improve the overall performance of PHY-SI in certain important communication scenarios. In particular, we highlight the extension of several concepts borrowed from conventional single-service communications, such as artificial noise (AN), eigenmode transmission etc., to the scenario of PHY-SI. These techniques are shown to be effective in the design of reliable and robust PHY-SI schemes. Finally, several potential research directions are identified for future work.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Adaptive relaying protocol multiple-input multiple-output orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

In wireless broadband communications, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been adopted as a promising technique to mitigate multi-path fading and provide high spectral efficiency. In addition, cooperative communication can explore spatial diversity where several users or nodes share their resources and cooperate through distributed transmission. The concatenation of the OFDM technique with relaying systems can enhance the overall performance in terms of spectral efficiency and improve robustness against the detrimental effects of fading. Hybrid relay selection is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of conventional forwarding schemes. However, exciting hybrid relay protocols may suffer some limitations when used for transmission over frequency-selective channels. The combination of cooperative protocols with OFDM systems has been extensively utilized in current wireless networks, and have become a promising solution for future high data rate broadband communication systems including 3D video transmission. This thesis covers two areas of high data rate networks. In the first part, several techniques using cooperative OFDM systems are presented including relay selection, space time block codes, resource allocation and adaptive bit and power allocation to introduce diversity. Four (4) selective OFDM relaying schemes are studied over wireless networks; selective OFDM; selective OFDMA; selective block OFDM and selective unequal block OFDM. The closed-form expression of these schemes is derived. By exploiting the broadcast nature, it is demonstrated that spatial diversity can be improved. The upper bound of outage probability for the protocols is derived. A new strategy for hybrid relay selection is proposed to improve the system performance by removing the sub-carriers that experience deep fading. The per subcarrier basis selection is considered with respect to the predefined threshold signal-to-noise ratio. The closed-form expressions of the proposed protocol in terms of bit error probability and outage probability are derived and compared with conventional hybrid relay selection. Adaptive bit and power allocation is also discussed to improve the system performance. Distributed space frequency coding applied to hybrid relay selection to obtain full spatial and full data rate transmission is explored. Two strategies, single cluster and multiple clusters, are considered for the Alamouti code at the destination by using a hybrid relay protocol. The power allocation with and without sub-carrier pairing is also investigated to mitigate the effect of multipath error propagation in frequency-selective channels. The second part of this thesis investigates the application of cooperative OFDM systems to high data rate transmission. Recently, there has been growing attention paid to 3D video transmission over broadband wireless channels. Two strategies for relay selection hybrid relay selection and first best second best are proposed to implement unequal error protection in the physical layer over error prone channels. The closed-form expressions of bit error probability and outage probability for both strategies are examined. The peak signal-to-noise ratio is presented to show the quality of reconstruction of the left and right views

RESOURCE ALLOCATION FOR WIRELESS RELAY NETWORKS

In this thesis, we propose several resource allocation strategies for relay networks in the context of joint power and bandwidth allocation and relay selection, and joint power allocation and subchannel assignment for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) systems. Sharing the two best ordered relays with equal power between the two users over Rayleigh flat fading channels is proposed to establish full diversity order for both users. Closed form expressions for the outage probability, and bit error probability (BEP) performance measures for both amplify and forward (AF) and decode and forward (DF) cooperative communication schemes are developed for different scenarios. To utilize the full potentials of relay-assisted transmission in multi user systems, we propose a mixed strategy of AF relaying and direct transmission, where the user transmits part of the data using the relay, and the other part is transmitted using the direct link. The resource allocation problem is formulated to maximize the sum rate. A recursive algorithm alternating between power allocation and bandwidth allocation steps is proposed to solve the formulated resource allocation problem. Due to the conflict between limited wireless resources and the fast growing wireless demands, Stackelberg game is proposed to allocate the relay resources (power and bandwidth) between competing users, aiming to maximize the relay benefits from selling its resources. We prove the uniqueness of Stackelberg Nash Equilibrium (SNE) for the proposed game. We develop a distributed algorithm to reach SNE, and investigate the conditions for the stability of the proposed algorithm. We propose low complexity algorithms for AF-OFDMA and DF-OFDMA systems to assign the subcarriers to the users based on high SNR approximation aiming to maximize the weighted sum rate. Auction framework is proposed to devise competition based solutions for the resource allocation of AF-OFDMA aiming tomaximize either vi the sum rate or the fairness index. Two auction algorithms are proposed; sequential and one-shot auctions. In sequential auction, the users evaluate the subcarrier based on the rate marginal contribution. In the one-shot auction, the users evaluate the subcarriers based on an estimate of the Shapley value and bids on all subcarriers at once