Cooperative diversity techniques for high-throughput wireless relay networks

Relay communications has attracted a growing interest in wireless communications with application to various enhanced technologies. This thesis considers a number of issues related to data throughput in various wireless relay network models. Particularly, new implementations of network coding (NC) and space-time coding (STC) techniques are investigated to offer various means of achieving high-throughput relay communications. Firstly, this thesis investigates different practical automatic repeat request (ARQ) retransmission protocols based on NC for two-way wireless relay networks to improve throughput efficiency. Two improved NC-based ARQ schemes are designed based on go-back-N and selective-repeat (SR) protocols. Addressing ARQ issues in multisource multidestination relay networks, a new NC-based ARQ protocol is proposed and two packet-combination algorithms are developed for retransmissions at relay and sources to significantly improve the throughput. In relation to the concept of channel quality indicator (CQI) reporting in two-way relay networks, two new efficient CQI reporting schemes are designed based on NC to improve the system throughput by allowing two terminals to simultaneously estimate the CQI of the distant terminal-relay link without incurring additional overhead. The transmission time for CQI feedback at the relays is reduced by half while the increase in complexity and the loss of performance are shown to be negligible. Furthermore, a low-complexity relay selection scheme is suggested to reduce the relay searching complexity. For the acknowledgment (ACK) process, this thesis proposes a new block ACK scheme based on NC to significantly reduce the ACK overheads and therefore produce an enhanced throughput. The proposed scheme is also shown to improve the reliability of block ACK transmission and reduce the number of data retransmissions for a higher system throughput. Additionally, this thesis presents a new cooperative retransmission scheme based on relay cooperation and NC to considerably reduce the number of retransmission packets and im- prove the reliability of retransmissions for a more power efficient and higher throughput system with non-overlapped retransmissions. Moreover, two relay selection schemes are recommended to determine the optimised number of relays for the retransmission. Finally, with respect to cognitive wireless relay networks (CWRNs), this thesis proposes a new cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) scheme to improve the spectrum sensing performance and design a new CSS scheme based on NC for three-hop CWRNs to improve system throughput. Furthermore, a new distributed space-time-frequency block code (DSTFBC) is designed for a two- hop nonregenerative CWRN over frequency-selective fading channels. The proposed DSTFBC design achieves higher data rate, spatial diversity gain, and decoupling detection of data blocks at all destination nodes with a low-complexity receiver structure

Optimisation of relay placement in wireless butterfly networks

As a typical model of multicast network, wireless butterfly networks (WBNs) have been studied for modelling the scenario when two source nodes wish to convey data to two destination nodes via an intermediary node namely relay node. In the context of wireless communications, when receiving two data packets from the two source nodes, the relay node can employ either physical-layer network coding or analogue network coding on the combined packet prior to forwarding to the two destination nodes. Evaluating the energy efficiency of these combination approaches, energy-delay trade-off (EDT) is worth to be investigated and the relay placement should be taken into account in the practical network design. This chapter will first investigate the EDT of network coding in the WBNs. Based on the derived EDT, algorithms that optimize the relay position will be developed to either minimize the transmission delay or minimize the energy consumption subject to constraints on power allocation and location of nodes. Furthermore, considering an extended model of the WBN, the relay placement will be studied for a general wireless multicast network with multiple source, relay and destination nodes

Study of Techniques For Reliable Data Transmission In Wireless Sensor Networks

This thesis addresses the problem of traffic transfer in wireless sensor networks (WSN). In such networks, the foremost challenge in the design of data communication techniques is that the sensor's transceiver circuitry consumes the major portion of the available power. Thus, due to stringent limitations on the nodes' hardware and power resources in WSN, data transmission must be power-efficient in order to reduce the nodes' power consumption, and hence to maximize the network lifetime while satisfying the required data rate. The transmit power is itself under the influence of data rate and source-destination distance. Thanks to the dense deployment of nodes in WSN, multi-hop communication can be applied to mitigate the transmit power for sending bits of information, i.e., gathered data by the sensor nodes to the destination node (gateway) compared to single-hop scenarios. In our approach, we achieve a reasonable trade-off between power-efficiency and transmission data rate by devising cooperative communication strategies through which the network traffic (i.e. nodes' gathered information) is relayed hop-by-hop to the gateway. In such strategies, the sensor nodes serve as data originator as well as data router, and assist the data transfer from the sensors to the gateway. We develop several data transmission schemes, and we prove their capability in transmitting the data from the sensor nodes at the highest possible rates allowed by the network limitations. In particular, we consider that (i) network has linear or quasi-linear topology, (ii) nodes are equipped with half-duplex radios, implying that they cannot transmit and receive simultaneously, (iii) nodes transmit their traffic at the same average rate. We compute the average data rate corresponding to each proposed strategy. Next, we take an information-theoretic approach and derive an upper bound to the achievable rate of traffic transfer in the networks under consideration, and analyze its tightness. We show that our proposed strategies outperform the conventional multi-hop scheme, and their average achievable rate approaches the upper bound at low levels of signal to noise ratio

Seleção automática de nodos cooperantes em abordagens de comunicação cooperativa em redes de sensores sem fio

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia de Automação e Sistemas, Florianópolis, 2017.As Redes de Sensores Sem Fio (RSSF) estão sujeitas a problemas de confiabilidade de comunicação devido a interferências, atenuação de sinal, obstáculos etc. Nessas redes, a diversidade cooperativa é uma técnica muito utilizada para melhorar o desempenho das comunicações, na qual alguns nodos são escolhidos como cooperantes e são responsáveis por retransmitir mensagens de outros nodos. A escolha de quais nodos cumprirão o papel de nodos cooperantes é uma etapa decisiva na aplicação desta técnica. Alguns trabalhos na literatura fazem a escolha baseada apenas em um ou, no máximo, dois parâmetros, não sendo capazes de fazer uma escolha eficiente, reduzindo consequentemente a confiabilidade obtida em suas propostas. Nesta dissertação é proposta uma nova técnica de seleção de nodos cooperantes, chamada Smart, a qual considera vários critérios que são relevantes para o funcionamento da rede. A seleção é realizada usando técnicas de otimização, visando selecionar o menor número de nodos cooperantes mas, assegurando que todos os nodos da rede possuam um vizinho que seja cooperante, aumentando as chances das mensagens serem entregues ao destino. Para avaliar a técnica Smart foi utilizado o simulador OMNeT++/Castalia, comparando-a com três técnicas do estado do arte. Os resultados mostram que a técnica Smart apresenta um desempenho superior às outras técnicas analisadas.Abstract : Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs) are subject to communication problems due to interference, signal attenuation, obstacles, etc. In these networks, cooperative diversity is a widely used technique for improving the communications performance, where some nodes are selected as relay and are responsible to assist neighbors nodes with packets retransmissions. The selection of relays nodes is a decisive step whenever this technique is applied. Some studies in the literature select relays nodes based on only one or two parameters. Consequently, this type of technique is unable to select relay node in an efficient way, reducing the network reliability. This master thesis proposes a new technique, named Smart, for the selection of relay WSN nodes according to criteria considered relevant for an adequate network operation. The selection is performed using optimization techniques, which target the selection of the smallest number of relay nodes and, at same time, ensure that all nodes are linked to at least one corresponding relay node, enabling messages reach their destinations in noisy environments. OMNeT++/Castalia was used to evaluate the Smart technique, which was compared with three state-of-the-art techniques. Simulation results show that the Smart technique clearly outperforms other analyzed state-of-the-art cooperative communication techniques

Management: A bibliography for NASA managers

This bibliography lists 630 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System in 1991. Items are selected and grouped according to their usefulness to the manager as manager. Citations are grouped into ten subject categories: human factors and personnel issues; management theory and techniques; industrial management and manufacturing; robotics and expert systems; computers and information management; research and development; economics, costs and markets; logistics and operations management; reliability and quality control; and legality, legislation, and policy