Detection techniques for alternate-relaying cooperative communications systems

Cooperative technology constitutes a breakthrough in the design of wireless communication systems. This is due to its relatively simple implementation and its significant performance gains in terms of link reliability, system capacity, and transmission range. In cooperative communications, multiple terminals in a network cooperate by relaying each other’s information, forming a virtual antenna array, and, thus realizing spatial diversity in a distributed fashion. It is not surprising that cooperative communications have become a strong candidate for many wireless applications, such as cellular networks, wireless local area network, mobile ad-hoc networks, and wireless sensor networks. However, cooperative technology is not without challenges. A major problem in this technology is the reduction in spectral efficiency, which results from the half-duplex constraint at the relays and orthogonal relay transmission. This has spurred researchers to investigate cooperative strategies to recover the spectral efficiency loss. Such strategies can be classified into three main categories. One category supposes that each source transmits a ’superimposed’ signal, which consists of its own data and relaying information. This superposition can be performed in code or in modulation domain. Obviously, if the relay does not have its own data, a full-rate transmission can not be achieved. The second category is to employ adaptive modulation techniques where the spectral efficiency is improved by changing modulation size with fixed symbol rate. However, the transmitter needs to know the channel signal-to-noise (SNR) such that the best suitable modulation is chosen and the receiver must be informed on the used modulation in order to decode the information. This leads to an increased overhead in the system as compared with a fixed modulation system, and will increase the complexity of the receiver too. The third one utilizes two-relay, which alternatively transmit and receive. A key feature of this category is that the source continues to transmit data, while the two relays take turns in receiving and transmitting the data from the source. Due to the simultaneous transmission of the data streams through both direct and one of relay channels, harmful interference occurs at the relays and destination. The interference occurred at the relays and destination represents a drawback in this case, though. According to our best knowledge, no previous research was done to develop the optimal detectors for alternate-relaying cooperative (ARC) systems. Further, all the previous works for ARC systems have in common that they do not exploit any properties of the underlying error correcting codes. It is therefore necessary to propose optimal detection techniques for uncoded and coded two-relay systems. This motivated us to do this research. In this thesis, we proposed optimal and suboptimal detectors to mitigate the influence of the interference signal for the uncoded and coded decode-and-forward (DF) ARC systems

Adaptive Communication for Wireless Massive MIMO Systems

The demand for high data rates in wireless communications is increasing rapidly. One way to provide reliable communication with increased rates is massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems where a large number of antennas is deployed. We analyze three systems utilizing a large number of antennas to provide enhancement in the performance of wireless communications. First, we consider a general form of spatial modulation (SM) systems where the number of transmitted data streams is allowed to vary and we refer to it as generalized spatial modulation with multiplexing (GSMM). A Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is shown to accurately model the transmitted spatially modulated signal using a precoding framework. Using this transmit model, a general closed-form expression for the achievable rate when operating over Rayleigh fading channels is evaluated along with a tight upper and a lower bounds for the achievable rate. The obtained expressions are flexible enough to accommodate any form of SM by adjusting the precoding set. Followed by that, we study quantized distributed wireless relay networks where a relay consisting of many geographically dispersed nodes is facilitating communication between unconnected users. Due to bandwidth constraints, distributed relay networks perform quantization at the relay nodes, and hence they are referred to as quantized distributed relay networks. In such systems, users transmit their data simultaneously to the relay nodes through the uplink channel that quantize their observed signals independently to a few bits and broadcast these bits to the users through the downlink channel. We develop algorithms that can be employed by the users to estimate the uplink channels between all users and all relay nodes when the relay nodes are performing simple sign quantization. This setup is very useful in either extending coverage to unconnected regions or replacing the existing wireless infrastructure in case of disasters. Using the uplink channel estimates, we propose multiple decoders that can be deployed at the receiver side. We also study the performance of each of these decoders under different system assumptions. A different quantization framework is also proposed for quantized distributed relay networking where the relay nodes perform vector quantization instead of sign quantization. Applying vector quantization at the relay nodes enables us to propose an algorithm that allocates quantization resources efficiently among the relay nodes inside the relay network. We also study the beamforming design at the users’ side in this case where beamforming design is not trivial due to the quantization that occurs at the relay network. Finally, we study a different setup of distributed communication systems called cell-free massive MIMO. In cell-free massive MIMO, regular cellular communication is replaced by multiple access points (APs) that are placed randomly over the coverage area. All users in the coverage area are sharing time and frequency resources and all APs are serving all UEs while power allocation is done in a central processor that is connected to the APs through a high speed backhaul network. We study the power allocation in cell-free massive MIMO system where APs are equipped with few antennas and how the distribution of the available antennas among access points affects both the performance and the infrastructure cost

Distributed space-time coding including the golden code with application in cooperative networks

This thesis presents new methodologies to improve performance of wireless cooperative networks using the Golden Code. As a form of space-time coding, the Golden Code can achieve diversity-multiplexing tradeoff and the data rate can be twice that of the Alamouti code. In practice, however, asynchronism between relay nodes may reduce performance and channel quality can be degraded from certain antennas. Firstly, a simple offset transmission scheme, which employs full interference cancellation (FIC) and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), is enhanced through the use of four relay nodes and receiver processing to mitigate asynchronism. Then, the potential reduction in diversity gain due to the dependent channel matrix elements in the distributed Golden Code transmission, and the rate penalty of multihop transmission, are mitigated by relay selection based on two-way transmission. The Golden Code is also implemented in an asynchronous one-way relay network over frequency flat and selective channels, and a simple approach to overcome asynchronism is proposed. In one-way communication with computationally efficient sphere decoding, the maximum of the channel parameter means is shown to achieve the best performance for the relay selection through bit error rate simulations. Secondly, to reduce the cost of hardware when multiple antennas are available in a cooperative network, multi-antenna selection is exploited. In this context, maximum-sum transmit antenna selection is proposed. End-to-end signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is calculated and outage probability analysis is performed when the links are modelled as Rayleigh fading frequency flat channels. The numerical results support the analysis and for a MIMO system maximum-sum selection is shown to outperform maximum-minimum selection. Additionally, pairwise error probability (PEP) analysis is performed for maximum-sum transmit antenna selection with the Golden Code and the diversity order is obtained. Finally, with the assumption of fibre-connected multiple antennas with finite buffers, multiple-antenna selection is implemented on the basis of maximum-sum antenna selection. Frequency flat Rayleigh fading channels are assumed together with a decode and forward transmission scheme. Outage probability analysis is performed by exploiting the steady-state stationarity of a Markov Chain model

Radio Communications

In the last decades the restless evolution of information and communication technologies (ICT) brought to a deep transformation of our habits. The growth of the Internet and the advances in hardware and software implementations modified our way to communicate and to share information. In this book, an overview of the major issues faced today by researchers in the field of radio communications is given through 35 high quality chapters written by specialists working in universities and research centers all over the world. Various aspects will be deeply discussed: channel modeling, beamforming, multiple antennas, cooperative networks, opportunistic scheduling, advanced admission control, handover management, systems performance assessment, routing issues in mobility conditions, localization, web security. Advanced techniques for the radio resource management will be discussed both in single and multiple radio technologies; either in infrastructure, mesh or ad hoc networks

Cooperative Detection and Network Coding in Wireless Networks

In cooperative communication systems, multiple terminals in wireless networks share their antennas and resources for information exchange and processing. Recently, cooperative communications have been shown to achieve significant performance improvements in terms of transmission reliability, coverage area extension, and network throughput, with respect to existing classical communication systems. This dissertation is focused on two important applications of cooperative communications, namely: (i) cooperative distributed detection in wireless sensor networks, and (ii) many-to-many communications via cooperative space-time network coding. The first application of cooperative communications presented in this dissertation is concerned with the analysis and modeling of the deployment of cooperative relay nodes in wireless sensor networks. Particularly, in dense wireless sensor networks, sensor nodes continuously observe and collect measurements of a physical phenomenon. Such observations can be highly correlated, depending on the spatial separation between the sensor nodes as well as how the physical properties of the phenomenon are evolving over time. This unique characteristic of wireless sensor networks can be effectively exploited with cooperative communications and relays deployment such that the distributed detection performance is significantly improved as well as the energy efficiency. In particular, this dissertation studies the Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relays deployment as a function of the correlation of the observations and analyzes the achievable spatial diversity gains as compared with the classical wireless sensor networks. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the gains of cooperation can be further leveraged to alleviate bandwidth utilization inefficiencies in current sensor networks. Specifically, the deployment of cognitive AF cooperative relays to exploit empty/under-utilized time-slots and the resulting energy savings are studied, quantified and compared. The multiple terminal communication and information exchange form the second application of cooperative communications in this dissertation. Specifically, the novel concept of Space-Time-Network Coding (STNC) that is concerned with formulation of the many-to-many cooperative communications over Decode-and-Forward (DF) nodes is studied and analyzed. Moreover, the exact theoretical analysis as well as upper-bounds on the network symbol error rate performance are derived. In addition, the tradeoff between the number of communicating nodes and the timing synchronization errors is analyzed and provided as a network design guideline. With STNC, it is illustrated that cooperative diversity gains are fully exploited per node and significant performance improvements are achieved. It is concluded that the STNC scheme serves as a potential many-to-many cooperative communications scheme and that its scope goes much further beyond the generic source-relay-destination communications

High Capacity CDMA and Collaborative Techniques

The thesis investigates new approaches to increase the user capacity and improve the error performance of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) by employing adaptive interference cancellation and collaborative spreading and space diversity techniques. Collaborative Coding Multiple Access (CCMA) is also investigated as a separate technique and combined with CDMA. The advantages and shortcomings of CDMA and CCMA are analysed and new techniques for both the uplink and downlink are proposed and evaluated. Multiple access interference (MAI) problem in the uplink of CDMA is investigated first. The practical issues of multiuser detection (MUD) techniques are reviewed and a novel blind adaptive approach to interference cancellation (IC) is proposed. It exploits the constant modulus (CM) property of digital signals to blindly suppress interference during the despreading process and obtain amplitude estimation with minimum mean squared error for use in cancellation stages. Two new blind adaptive receiver designs employing successive and parallel interference cancellation architectures using the CM algorithm (CMA) referred to as ‘CMA-SIC’ and ‘BA-PIC’, respectively, are presented. These techniques have shown to offer near single user performance for large number of users. It is shown to increase the user capacity by approximately two fold compared with conventional IC receivers. The spectral efficiency analysis of the techniques based on output signal-to interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) also shows significant gain in data rate. Furthermore, an effective and low complexity blind adaptive subcarrier combining (BASC) technique using a simple gradient descent based algorithm is proposed for Multicarrier-CDMA. It suppresses MAI without any knowledge of channel amplitudes and allows large number of users compared with equal gain and maximum ratio combining techniques normally used in practice. New user collaborative schemes are proposed and analysed theoretically and by simulations in different channel conditions to achieve spatial diversity for uplink of CCMA and CDMA. First, a simple transmitter diversity and its equivalent user collaborative diversity techniques for CCMA are designed and analysed. Next, a new user collaborative scheme with successive interference cancellation for uplink of CDMA referred to as collaborative SIC (C-SIC) is investigated to reduce MAI and achieve improved diversity. To further improve the performance of C-SIC under high system loading conditions, Collaborative Blind Adaptive SIC (C-BASIC) scheme is proposed. It is shown to minimize the residual MAI, leading to improved user capacity and a more robust system. It is known that collaborative diversity schemes incur loss in throughput due to the need of orthogonal time/frequency slots for relaying source’s data. To address this problem, finally a novel near-unity-rate scheme also referred to as bandwidth efficient collaborative diversity (BECD) is proposed and evaluated for CDMA. Under this scheme, pairs of users share a single spreading sequence to exchange and forward their data employing a simple superposition or space-time encoding methods. At the receiver collaborative joint detection is performed to separate each paired users’ data. It is shown that the scheme can achieve full diversity gain at no extra bandwidth as inter-user channel SNR becomes high. A novel approach of ‘User Collaboration’ is introduced to increase the user capacity of CDMA for both the downlink and uplink. First, collaborative group spreading technique for the downlink of overloaded CDMA system is introduced. It allows the sharing of the same single spreading sequence for more than one user belonging to the same group. This technique is referred to as Collaborative Spreading CDMA downlink (CS-CDMA-DL). In this technique T-user collaborative coding is used for each group to form a composite codeword signal of the users and then a single orthogonal sequence is used for the group. At each user’s receiver, decoding of composite codeword is carried out to extract the user’s own information while maintaining a high SINR performance. To improve the bit error performance of CS-CDMA-DL in Rayleigh fading conditions, Collaborative Space-time Spreading (C-STS) technique is proposed by combining the collaborative coding multiple access and space-time coding principles. A new scheme for uplink of CDMA using the ‘User Collaboration’ approach, referred to as CS-CDMA-UL is presented next. When users’ channels are independent (uncorrelated), significantly higher user capacity can be achieved by grouping multiple users to share the same spreading sequence and performing MUD on per group basis followed by a low complexity ML decoding at the receiver. This approach has shown to support much higher number of users than the available sequences while also maintaining the low receiver complexity. For improved performance under highly correlated channel conditions, T-user collaborative coding is also investigated within the CS-CDMA-UL system

Advanced receivers for distributed cooperation in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are rapidly deployable wireless communications systems, operating with minimal coordination in order to avoid spectral efficiency losses caused by overhead. Cooperative transmission schemes are attractive for MANETs, but the distributed nature of such protocols comes with an increased level of interference, whose impact is further amplified by the need to push the limits of energy and spectral efficiency. Hence, the impact of interference has to be mitigated through with the use PHY layer signal processing algorithms with reasonable computational complexity. Recent advances in iterative digital receiver design techniques exploit approximate Bayesian inference and derivative message passing techniques to improve the capabilities of well-established turbo detectors. In particular, expectation propagation (EP) is a flexible technique which offers attractive complexity-performance trade-offs in situations where conventional belief propagation is limited by computational complexity. Moreover, thanks to emerging techniques in deep learning, such iterative structures are cast into deep detection networks, where learning the algorithmic hyper-parameters further improves receiver performance. In this thesis, EP-based finite-impulse response decision feedback equalizers are designed, and they achieve significant improvements, especially in high spectral efficiency applications, over more conventional turbo-equalization techniques, while having the advantage of being asymptotically predictable. A framework for designing frequency-domain EP-based receivers is proposed, in order to obtain detection architectures with low computational complexity. This framework is theoretically and numerically analysed with a focus on channel equalization, and then it is also extended to handle detection for time-varying channels and multiple-antenna systems. The design of multiple-user detectors and the impact of channel estimation are also explored to understand the capabilities and limits of this framework. Finally, a finite-length performance prediction method is presented for carrying out link abstraction for the EP-based frequency domain equalizer. The impact of accurate physical layer modelling is evaluated in the context of cooperative broadcasting in tactical MANETs, thanks to a flexible MAC-level simulato

Introduction to free space optical (FSO) communications

The demand for high bandwidth and secure communication is increasing. Free space optical (FSO) wireless communications technology could be one possible alternative option to the RF technologies that can be adopted in certain applications to unlock the bandwidth bottleneck issue, specifically in the last mile access networks, between mobile base stations in RF cellular wireless networks, and for radio over fiber; and over the last decade, we have seen growing research and development activities in FSO communications in the field of high data rate wireless technology applications as well as the emergence of commercial systems