Energy Efficient, Cooperative Communication in Low-Power Wireless Networks

The increased interest in massive deployment of wireless sensors and network densification requires more innovation in low-latency communication across multi-hop networks. Moreover, the resource constrained nature of sensor nodes calls for more energy efficient transmission protocols, in order to increase the battery life of said devices. Therefore, it is important to investigate possible technologies that would aid in improving energy efficiency and decreasing latency in wireless sensor networks (WSN) while focusing on application specific requirements. To this end, and based on state of the art Glossy, a low-power WSN flooding protocol, this dissertation introduces two energy efficient, cooperative transmission schemes for low-power communication in WSNs, with the aim of achieving performance gains in energy efficiency, latency and power consumption. These approaches apply several cooperative transmission technologies such as physical layer network coding and transmit beamforming. Moreover, mathematical tools such as convex optimization and game theory are used in order to analytically construct the proposed schemes. Then, system level simulations are performed, where the proposed schemes are evaluated based on different criteria. First, in order to improve over all latency in the network as well as energy efficiency, MF-Glossy is proposed; a communication scheme that enables the simultaneous flooding of different packets from multiple sources to all nodes in the network. Using a communication-theoretic analysis, upper bounds on the performance of Glossy and MF-Glossy are determined. Further, simulation results show that MF-Glossy has the potential to achieve several-fold improvements in goodput and latency across a wide spectrum of network configurations at lower energy costs and comparable packet reception rates. Hardware implementation challenges are discussed as a step towards harnessing the potential of MF-Glossy in real networks, while focusing on key challenges and possible solutions. Second, under the assumption of available channel state information (CSI) at all nodes, centralized and distributed beamforming and power control algorithms are proposed and their performance is evaluated. They are compared in terms of energy efficiency to standard Glossy. Numerical simulations demonstrate that a centralized power control scheme can achieve several-fold improvements in energy efficiency over Glossy across a wide spectrum of network configurations at comparable packet reception rates. Furthermore, the more realistic scenario where CSI is not available at transmitting nodes is considered. To battle CSI unavailability, cooperation is introduced on two stages. First, cooperation between receiving and transmitting nodes is proposed for the process of CSI acquisition, where the receivers provide the transmitters with quantized (e.g. imperfect) CSI. Then, cooperation within transmitting nodes is proposed for the process of multi-cast transmit beamforming. In addition to an analytical formulation of the robust multi-cast beamforming problem with imperfect CSI, its performance is evaluated, in terms of energy efficiency, through numerical simulations. It is shown that the level of cooperation, represented by the number of limited feedback bits from receivers to transmitters, greatly impacts energy efficiency. To this end, the optimization problem of finding the optimal number of feedback bits B is formulated, as a programming problem, under QoS constraints of 5% maximum outage. Numerical simulations show that there exists an optimal number of feedback bits that maximizes energy efficiency. Finally, the effect of choosing cooperating transmitters on energy efficiency is studied, where it is shown that an optimum group of cooperating transmit nodes, also known as a transmit coalition, can be formed in order to maximize energy efficiency. The investigated techniques including optimum feedback bits and transmit coalition formation can achieve a 100% increase in energy efficiency when compared to state of the art Glossy under same operation requirements in very dense networks. In summary, the two main contributions in this dissertation provide insights on the possible performance gains that can be achieved when cooperative technologies are used in low-power wireless networks

Beamforming optimization for two-way relay channel

In this thesis, we focus on the optimization of the two-way relay channel (TWRC), which can double the data rate of communications comparing to the traditional one-way relay channel (OWRC). Because of the broadcasting nature of wireless transmissions, secure transmission is an appealing research topic. We take secrecy rate consideration into the optimization of the TWRC. Overall we provide near-optimal solutions for the secrecy rate maximization problems of the TWRC with imperfect channel state information (ICSI). A much lower complexity optimal SOCP solution is provided for SNR balancing of the TWRC without secrecy consideration. We first look at a flat fading TWRC network model with a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay where perfect channel state information (CSI) is assumed available. We then formulate an optimization problem, with the objective to minimize the relay’s power usage under the constraints that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the two transceivers should exceed a preset threshold. A low-complexity optimal beamforming solution is provided to this optimization problem by reformulating it in the form of second-order cone programming (SOCP). Later in the thesis, we consider the presence of an eavesdropper and address the beamforming optimization for minimizing the relay’s power with the constraints of the secrecy rates of the two transceivers. A semi-definite programming (SDP) based searching algorithm is proposed to find a near-optimal solution. For each search of the proposed approach, the previous non-convex optimization problem is transferred into an SDP problem, which can guarantee the optimality of the beamforming matrix. Afterwards, more realistic imperfect CSI (ICSI) situations are considered for the TWRC network models. As ICSI completely changes the structure and the property of the optimization problems, we reformulate the optimization problems into two scenarios. For the first case, we consider that the relay is an untrusted eavesdropper and in this case an SDP solution is provided to maximize the joint-decoding sum-secrecy rate. For the second case, we investigate the robust beamforming problems where the relay is trusted but there is an external eavesdropper, another SDP solution is provided to maximize the sum-secrecy rate

Robust distributed beamforming for wireless relay networks

In this paper, we consider a robust distributed beamforming design that minimizes total relay transmit power with signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint for a wireless relay network in the presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the relays. We consider a system with a transmit and a receive node, and a set of relay nodes. We assume there is no direct link between the transmit and receive nodes. Each node is equipped with a single antenna. The relay nodes perform amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying. The distributed beamforming design based on the assumption of perfect CSI at the relays fails to guarantee the SNR when the CSI available at the relay nodes is imperfect. We present a robust design which ensures that the SNR constraint is satisfied in the presence of imperfect CSI. We adopt a worst-case design and formulate the problem as a convex optimization problem that can be solved efficiently. The robustness of the proposed design to imperfections in CSI is illustrated through simulations