Cooperative Relaying and Resource Allocation in Future-Generation Cellular Networks

Driven by the significant consumer demand for reliable and high data rate communications, the future-generation cellular systems are expected to employ cutting-edge techniques to improve the service provisioning at substantially reduced costs. Cooperative relaying is one of the primary techniques due to its ability to improve the spectrum utilization by taking advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless signals. This dissertation studies the physical layer cooperative relaying technique and resource allocation schemes in the cooperative cellular networks to improve the spectrum and energy efficiency from the perspectives of downlink transmission, uplink transmission and device-to-device transmission, respectively. For the downlink transmission, we consider an LTE-Advanced cooperative cellular network with the deployment of Type II in-band decode-and-forward relay stations (RSs) to enhance the cell-edge throughput and to extend the coverage area. This type of relays can better exploit the broadcast nature of wireless signals while improving the utilization of existing allocated spectral resources. For such a network, we propose joint orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) subcarrier and power allocation schemes to optimize the downlink multi-user transmission efficiency. Firstly, an optimal power dividing method between eNB and RS is proposed to maximize the achievable rate on each subcarrier. Based on this result, we show that the optimal joint resource allocation scheme for maximizing the overall throughput is to allocate each subcarrier to the user with the best channel quality and to distribute power in a water-filling manner. Since the users' Quality of Service (QoS) provision is one of the major design objectives in cellular networks, we further formulate a lexicographical optimization problem to maximize the minimum rate of all users while improving the overall throughput. A sufficient condition for optimality is derived. Due to the complexity of searching for the optimal solution, we then propose an efficient, low-complexity suboptimal joint resource allocation algorithm, which outperforms the existing suboptimal algorithms that simplify the joint design into separate allocation. Both theoretical and numerical analyses demonstrate that our proposed scheme can drastically improve the fairness as well as the overall throughput. As the physical layer uplink transmission technology for LTE-Advanced cellular network is based on single carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) with frequency domain equalization (FDE), this dissertation further studies the uplink achievable rate and power allocation to improve the uplink spectrum efficiency in the cellular network. Different from the downlink OFDM system, signals on all subcarriers in the SC-FDMA system are transmitted sequentially rather than in parallel, thus the user's achievable rate is not simply the summation of the rates on all allocated subcarriers. Moreover, each user equipment (UE) has its own transmission power constraint instead of a total power constraint at the base station in the downlink case. Therefore, the uplink resource allocation problem in the LTE-Advanced system is more challenging. To this end, we first derive the achievable rates of the SC-FDMA system with two commonly-used FDE techniques, zero-forcing (ZF) equalization and minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalization, based on the joint superposition coding for cooperative relaying. We then propose optimal power allocation schemes among subcarriers at both UE and RS to maximize the overall throughput of the system. Theoretical analysis and numerical results are provided to demonstrate a significant gain in the system throughput by our proposed power allocation schemes. Besides the physical layer technology, the trend of improving energy efficiency in future cellular networks also motivates the network operators to continuously bring improvements in the entire network infrastructure. Such techniques include efficient base station (BS) redesign, opportunistic transmission such as device-to-device and cognitive radio communications. In the third part of this dissertation, we explore the potentials of employing cooperative relaying in a green device-to-device communication underlaying cellular network to improve the energy efficiency and spectrum utilization of the system. As the green base station is powered by sustainable energy, the design objective is to enhance both sustainability and efficiency of the device-to-device communication. Specifically, we first propose optimal power adaptation schemes to maximize the network spectrum efficiency under two practical power constraints. We then take the dynamics of the charging and discharging processes of the energy buffer at the BS into consideration to ensure the network sustainability. To this end, the energy buffer is modeled as a G/D/1 queue where the input energy has a general distribution. Power allocation schemes are proposed based on the statistics of the energy buffer to further enhance the network efficiency and sustainability. Theoretical analysis and numerical results are presented to demonstrate that our proposed power allocation schemes can improve the network throughput while maintaining the network sustainability at a certain level. Our analyses developed in this dissertation indicate that the cooperative transmission based on cooperative relaying can significantly improve the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency of the cellular network for downlink transmission, uplink transmission and device-to-device communication. Our proposed cooperative relaying technique and resource allocation schemes can provide efficient solutions to practical design and optimization of future-generation cellular networks

Collaborative modulation multiple access for single hop and multihop networks

While the bandwidth available for wireless networks is limited, the world has seen an unprecedented growth in the number of mobile subscribers and an ever increasing demand for high data rates. Therefore efficient utilisation of bandwidth to maximise link spectral efficiency and number of users that can be served simultaneously are primary goals in the design of wireless systems. To achieve these goals, in this thesis, a new non-orthogonal uplink multiple access scheme which combines the functionalities of adaptive modulation and multiple access called collaborative modulation multiple access (CMMA) is proposed. CMMA enables multiple users to access the network simultaneously and share the same bandwidth even when only a single receive antenna is available and in the presence of high channel correlation. Instead of competing for resources, users in CMMA share resources collaboratively by employing unique modulation sets (UMS) that differ in phase, power, and/or mapping structure. These UMS are designed to insure that the received signal formed from the superposition of all users’ signals belongs to a composite QAM constellation (CC) with a rate equal to the sum rate of all users. The CC and its constituent UMSs are designed centrally at the BS to remove ambiguity, maximize the minimum Euclidian distance (dmin) of the CC and insure a minimum BER performance is maintained. Users collaboratively precode their transmitted signal by performing truncated channel inversion and phase rotation using channel state information (CSI ) obtained from a periodic common pilot to insure that their combined signal at the BS belongs to the CC known at the BS which in turn performs a simple joint maximum likelihood detection without the need for CSI. The coherent addition of users’ power enables CMMA to achieve high link spectral efficiency at any time without extra power or bandwidth but on the expense of graceful degradation in BER performance. To improve the BER performance of CMMA while preserving its precoding and detection structure and without the need for pilot-aided channel estimation, a new selective diversity combining scheme called SC-CMMA is proposed. SC-CMMA optimises the overall group performance providing fairness and diversity gain for various users with different transmit powers and channel conditions by selecting a single antenna out of a group of L available antennas that minimises the total transmit power required for precoding at any one time. A detailed study of capacity and BER performance of CMMA and SC-CMMA is carried out under different level of channel correlations which shows that both offer high capacity gain and resilience to channel correlation. SC-CMMA capacity even increase with high channel correlation between users’ channels. CMMA provides a practical solution for implementing the multiple access adder channel (MAAC) in fading environments hence a hybrid approach combining both collaborative coding and modulation referred to as H-CMMA is investigated. H-CMMA divides users into a number of subgroups where users within a subgroup are assigned the same modulation set and different multiple access codes. H-CMMA adjusts the dmin of the received CC by varying the number of subgroups which in turn varies the number of unique constellation points for the same number of users and average total power. Therefore H-CMMA can accommodate many users with different rates while flexibly managing the complexity, rate and BER performance depending on the SNR. Next a new scheme combining CMMA with opportunistic scheduling using only partial CSI at the receiver called CMMA-OS is proposed to combine both the power gain of CMMA and the multiuser diversity gain that arises from users’ channel independence. To avoid the complexity and excessive feedback associated with the dynamic update of the CC, the BS takes into account the independence of users’ channels in the design of the CC and its constituent UMSs but both remain unchanged thereafter. However UMS are no longer associated with users, instead channel gain’s probability density function is divided into regions with identical probability and each UMS is associated with a specific region. This will simplify scheduling as users can initially chose their UMS based on their CSI and the BS will only need to resolve any collision when the channels of two or more users are located at the same region. Finally a high rate cooperative communication scheme, called cooperative modulation (CM) is proposed for cooperative multiuser systems. CM combines the reliability of the cooperative diversity with the high spectral efficiency and multiple access capabilities of CMMA. CM maintains low feedback and high spectral efficiency by restricting relaying to a single route with the best overall channel. Two possible variations of CM are proposed depending on whether CSI available only at the users or just at the BS and the selected relay. The first is referred to Precode, Amplify, and Forward (PAF) while the second one is called Decode, Remap, and Forward (DMF). A new route selection algorithm for DMF based on maximising dmin of random CC is also proposed using a novel fast low-complexity multi-stage sphere based algorithm to calculate the dmin at the relay of random CC that is used for both relay selection and detection

Energy and Spectral Efficient Inter Base Station Relaying in Cellular Systems

This paper considers a classic relay channel which consists of a source, a relay and a destination node and investigates the energy-spectral efficiency tradeoff under three different relay protocols: amplify-and-forward; decode-and-forward; and compress-and-forward. We focus on a cellular scenario where a neighbour base station can potentially act as the relay node to help on the transmissions of the source base station to its assigned mobile device. We employ a realistic power model and introduce a framework to evaluate the performance of different communication schemes for various deployments in a practical macrocell scenario. The results of this paper demonstrate that the proposed framework can be applied flexibly in practical scenarios to identify the pragmatic energy-spectral efficiency tradeoffs and choose the most appropriate scheme optimising the overall performance of inter base station relaying communications

Energy efficiency and interference management in long term evolution-advanced networks.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.Cellular networks are continuously undergoing fast extraordinary evolution to overcome technological challenges. The fourth generation (4G) or Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-Advanced) networks offer improvements in performance through increase in network density, while allowing self-organisation and self-healing. The LTE-Advanced architecture is heterogeneous, consisting of different radio access technologies (RATs), such as macrocell, smallcells, cooperative relay nodes (RNs), having various capabilities, and coexisting in the same geographical coverage area. These network improvements come with different challenges that affect users’ quality of service (QoS) and network performance. These challenges include; interference management, high energy consumption and poor coverage of marginal users. Hence, developing mitigation schemes for these identified challenges is the focus of this thesis. The exponential growth of mobile broadband data usage and poor networks’ performance along the cell edges, result in a large increase of the energy consumption for both base stations (BSs) and users. This due to improper RN placement or deployment that creates severe inter-cell and intracell interferences in the networks. It is therefore, necessary to investigate appropriate RN placement techniques which offer efficient coverage extension while reducing energy consumption and mitigating interference in LTE-Advanced femtocell networks. This work proposes energy efficient and optimal RN placement (EEORNP) algorithm based on greedy algorithm to assure improved and effective coverage extension. The performance of the proposed algorithm is investigated in terms of coverage percentage and number of RN needed to cover marginalised users and found to outperform other RN placement schemes. Transceiver design has gained importance as one of the effective tools of interference management. Centralised transceiver design techniques have been used to improve network performance for LTE-Advanced networks in terms of mean square error (MSE), bit error rate (BER) and sum-rate. The centralised transceiver design techniques are not effective and computationally feasible for distributed cooperative heterogeneous networks, the systems considered in this thesis. This work proposes decentralised transceivers design based on the least-square (LS) and minimum MSE (MMSE) pilot-aided channel estimations for interference management in uplink LTE-Advanced femtocell networks. The decentralised transceiver algorithms are designed for the femtocells, the macrocell user equipments (MUEs), RNs and the cell edge macrocell UEs (CUEs) in the half-duplex cooperative relaying systems. The BER performances of the proposed algorithms with the effect of channel estimation are investigated. Finally, the EE optimisation is investigated in half-duplex multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) relay systems. The EE optimisation is divided into sub-optimal EE problems due to the distributed architecture of the MU-MIMO relay systems. The decentralised approach is employed to design the transceivers such as MUEs, CUEs, RN and femtocells for the different sub-optimal EE problems. The EE objective functions are formulated as convex optimisation problems subject to the QoS and transmit powers constraints in case of perfect channel state information (CSI). The non-convexity of the formulated EE optimisation problems is surmounted by introducing the EE parameter substractive function into each proposed algorithms. These EE parameters are updated using the Dinkelbach’s algorithm. The EE optimisation of the proposed algorithms is achieved after finding the optimal transceivers where the unknown interference terms in the transmit signals are designed with the zero-forcing (ZF) assumption and estimation errors are added to improve the EE performances. With the aid of simulation results, the performance of the proposed decentralised schemes are derived in terms of average EE evaluation and found to be better than existing algorithms

Distributed radio resource management in LTE-advanced networks with type 1 relay

Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced is proposed as a candidate of the 4th generation (4G) mobile telecommunication systems. As an evolved version of LTE, LTE- Advanced is also based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and in addition, it adopts some emerging technologies, such as relaying. Type I relay nodes, de_ned in LTE-Advanced standards, can control their cells with their own reference signals and have Radio Resource Management (RRM) functionalities. The rationale of RRM is to decide which resources are allocated to which users for optimising performance metrics, such as throughput, fairness, power consumption and Quality of Service (QoS). The RRM techniques in LTE-Advanced networks, including route selection, resource partitioning and resource scheduling, are facing new challenges brought by Type 1 relay nodes and increasingly becoming research focuses in recent years. The research work presented in this thesis has made the following contributions. A service-aware adaptive bidirectional optimisation route selection strategy is proposed to consider both uplink optimisation and downlink optimisation according to service type. The load between di_erent serving nodes, including eNBs and relay nodes, are rebalanced under the _xed resource partitioning. The simulation results show that larger uplink throughputs and bidirectional throughputs can be achieved, compared with existing route selection strategies. A distributed two-hop proportional fair resource allocation scheme is proposed in order to provide better two-hop end-to-end proportional fairness for all the User Equipments (UEs), especially for the relay UEs. The resource partitioning is based on the cases of none Frequency Reuse (FR) pattern, full FR pattern and partial FR patterns. The resource scheduling in access links and backhaul links are considered jointly. A proportional fair joint route selection and resource partitioning algorithm isproposed to obtain an improved solution to the two-hop Adaptive Partial Frequency Reusing (APFR) problem with one relay node per cell. In addition, two special situations of APFR, full FR and no FR, are utilised to narrow the iterative search range of the proposed algorithm and reduce its complexity

Nonorthogonal Multiple Access for 5G and Beyond

This work was supported in part by the U.K. Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under Grant EP/N029720/1 and Grant EP/N029720/2. The work of L. Hanzo was supported by the ERC Advanced Fellow Grant Beam-me-up