Performance analysis of wireless relay systems

There has been phenomenal interest in applying space-time coding techniques in wireless communications in the last two decades. In general, the benefit of applying space-time codes in multiple-input, multiple-output (MIMO) wireless channels is an increase in transmission reliability or system throughput (capacity). However, such a benefit cannot be obtained in some wireless systems where size or other constraints preclude the use of multiple antennas. As such, wireless relay communications has recently been proposed as a means to provide spatial diversity in the face of this limitation. In this approach, some users or relay nodes assist the transmission of other users’ information. This dissertation contributes to the advancement of wireless relay communications by investigating the performance of various relaying signal processing methods under different practical fading environments. In particular, it examines two main relaying methods, namely decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF). For DF, the focus is on the diversity analysis of relaying systems under various practical protocols when detection error at relays is taken into account. In order to effectively mitigate the phenomenon of error propagation, the smart relaying technique proposed by Wang et al. in [R1] is adopted. First, diversity analysis of a single-relay system under the scenario that only the relay is allowed to transmit in the second time slot (called Protocol II) is carried out. For Nakagami and Hoyt generalized fading channels, analytical and numerical results are provided to demonstrate that the system always obtains the maximal diversity when binary phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation is used. Second, a novel and low-complexity relaying system is proposed when smart relaying and equal gain combing (EGC) techniques are combined. In the proposed system, the destination requires only the phases of the channel state information in order to detect the transmitted signals. For the single-relay system with M-ary PSK modulation, it is shown that the system can achieve the maximal diversity under Nakagami and Hoyt fading channels. For the K-relay system, simulation results suggest that the maximal diversity can also be achieved. Finally, the diversity analysis for a smart relaying system under the scenario when both the source and relay are permitted to transmit in the second time slot (referred to as Protocol I) is presented. It is shown that Protocol I can achieve the same diversity order as Protocol II for the case of 1 relay. In addition, the diversity is very robust to the quality of the feedback channel as well as the accuracy of the quantization of the power scaling implemented at the relay. For AF, the dissertation considers a fixed-gain multiple-relay system with maximal ratio combining (MRC) detection at the destination under Nakagami fading channels. Different from the smart relaying for DF, all the channel state information is assumed to be available at the destination in order to perform MRC for any number of antennas. Upperbound and lowerbound on the system performance are then derived. Based on the bounds, it is shown that the system can achieve the maximal diversity. Furthermore, the tightness of the upperbound is demonstrated via simulation results. With only the statistics of all the channels available at the destination, a novel power allocation (PA) is then proposed. The proposed PA shows significant performance gain over the conventional equal PA

Diversity techniques for broadband wireless communications: performance enhancement and analysis

The diversity techniques have been proven to be effective for next generation broadband wireless communications, and are the focus of this thesis. The diversity techniques can be broadly categorized into three types: Space, Time, and Frequency. In this thesis, we are mainly concerned with frequency and space diversity techniques. Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a frequency diversity technique which offers several benefits such as easier digital implementation, immunity to multipath channels, low complexity channel equalization, etc. Despite these desirable features, there are few inherent problems in OFDM such as high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR). High PAPR demands large dynamic range in the transmitted chain such as digital to analog converter (DAC) and power amplifier (PA). Unless pre-processed, the transmitted signal gets distorted due to quantization errors and inter-modulation. In the initial stage of PhD candidature, the author focused on PAPR reduction techniques. A simple modification on conventional iterative clipping and filtering (ICF) technique was proposed which has less computational complexity. The power savings achievable from clipping and filtering method was considered next. Furthermore the ICF is compared with another distortion-less PAPR reduction technique called Selective Mapping (SLM) based on power savings. Finally, impact of clipping and filtering on the channel estimation was analyzed. Space diversity seeks to exploit the multi-path characteristics of wireless channels to improve the performance. The simplest form of the space diversity is the receive diversity where two or more antennas with sufficient spacing collect independent copies of the same transmitted signal, which contributes to better signal reception. In this thesis new analytical expressions for spectral efficiency, capacity, and error rates were presented for adaptive systems with channel estimation error. Beamforming (steering signal towards desired receiver) is another useful technique in multiple-antenna systems to further improve the system performance. MRT (Maximal Ratio Transmission) or MIMO-MRC is such system where the transmitter, based on channel feedback from the receiver, uses weighting factors to steer the transmitted signal. Closed form expressions for symbol error rates were derived for MRT system with channel estimation error. The results were extended to evaluate closed form expressions of error rates for Rectangular QAM. Antenna correlation was considered in another contribution on MRC systems. Relay and Cooperative networks represent another form of spatial diversity and have recently attracted significant research attention. These networks rely on intermediate nodes called "relays" to establish communication between the source and the destination. In addition to coverage extension, the relay networks have shown to offer cooperative diversity when there is a direct link or multiple relays. The first contribution is to analyze a dual-hop amplify-forward relay networks with dissimilar fading scenarios. Next error rates of Rectangular QAM for decode-forward selection relay system are derived. Multiple antenna at relay is included to analyze the benefits of dual spatial diversity over Rayleigh and Nakagami fading channels. Antenna selection is a cost-effective way to exploit the antenna diversity. General Order Antenna Selection (GOAS), based on Ordered Statistics, is used to evaluate signal statistics for a MIMO relay network

Cooperative Transmission Techniques in Wireless Communication Networks

Cooperative communication networks have received significant interests from both academia and industry in the past decade due to its ability to provide spatial diversity without the need of implementing multiple transmit and/or receive antennas at the end-user terminals. These new communication networks have inspired novel ideas and approaches to find out what and how performance improvement can be provided with cooperative communications. The objective of this thesis is to design and analyze various cooperative transmission techniques under the two common relaying signal processing methods, namely decode-and-forward (DF) and amplify-and-forward (AF). For the DF method, the thesis focuses on providing performance improvement by mitigating detection errors at the relay(s). In particular, the relaying action is implemented adaptively to reduce the phenomenon of error propagation: whether or not a relay’s decision to retransmit depends on its decision variable and a predefined threshold. First, under the scenario that unequal error protection is employed to transmit different information classes at the source, a relaying protocol in a singlerelay network is proposed and its error performance is evaluated. It is shown that by setting the optimal signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) thresholds at the relay for different information classes, the overall error performance can be significantly improved. Second, for multiple-relay networks, a relay selection protocol, also based on SNR thresholds, is proposed and the optimal thresholds are also provided. Third, an adaptive relaying protocol and a low-complexity receiver are proposed when binary frequency-shift-keying (FSK) modulation is employed and neither the receiver nor the transmitter knows the fading coefficients. It is demonstrated that large performance improvements are possible when the optimal thresholds are implemented at the relays and destination. Finally, under the scenario that there is information feedback from the destination to the relays, a novel protocol is developed to achieve the maximum transmission throughput over a multiple-relay network while the bit-error rate satisfies a given constraint. With the AF method, the thesis examines a fixed-gain multiple-relay network in which the channels are temporally-correlated Rayleigh flat fading. Developed is a general framework for maximum-ratio-combining detection when M-FSK modulation is used and no channel state information is available at the destination. In particular, an upper-bound expression on the system’s error performance is derived and used to verify that the system achieves the maximal diversity order. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms the existing schemes for the multiple-relay network under consideration

Network Coding for Packet Radio Networks

We present methods for network-coded broadcast and multicast distribution of files in ad hoc networks of half-duplex packet radios. Two forms of network coding are investigated: fountain coding and random linear network coding. Our techniques exploit the broadcast nature of the wireless medium by permitting nodes to receive packets from senders other than their designated relays. File transfer is expedited by having multiple relays cooperate to forward the file to a destination. When relay nodes apply fountain coding to the file, they employ a simple mechanism to completely eliminate the possibility of sending duplicate packets to the recipients. It is not necessary for the nodes to transmit multiple packets simultaneously or to receive packets from multiple senders simultaneously. To combat the effects of time varying propagation loss on the links, each sender has the option to adapt the modulation format and channel-coding rate packet-by-packet by means of an adaptive transmission protocol. We use simulations to compare our network-coded file distributions with conventional broadcast and multicast techniques that use automatic repeat request (ARQ). Our numerical results show that the proposed strategies outperform ARQ-based file transfers by large margins for most network configurations. We also provide analytical upper bounds on the throughput of file distributions in networks comprising four nodes. We illustrate that our network-coded file-distribution strategies, when applied to the four-node networks, perform very close to the bounds

On The Performance of Underlay Relay Cognitive Networks

The bit error rate (BER) performance of underlay relay cognitive networks in the presence of Rayleigh fading is thoroughly analyzed in this paper. New exact and asymptotic analytic expressions under consideration of both interference power constraint and maximum transmit power constraint are derived in closed-form and are extensively corroborated by Monte-Carlo simulations. These expressions facilitate in evaluating effectively the network performance behaviour in key operation parameters as well as in optimizing system parameters. A multitude of analytical results expose that underlay relay cognitive networks experience the performance saturation phenomena while their performance considerably depends on the number of hops for the linear network model. Additionally, optimum relay position is significantly dependent of maximum transmit power, maximum interference power, and licensee location. Moreover, the appropriate order of locating unlicensees with different maximum transmit power levels can dramatically improve the network performance