On the Benefits of Network-Level Cooperation in Millimeter-Wave Communications

Relaying techniques for millimeter-wave wireless networks represent a powerful solution for improving the transmission performance. In this work, we quantify the benefits in terms of delay and throughput for a random-access multi-user millimeter-wave wireless network, assisted by a full-duplex network cooperative relay. The relay is equipped with a queue for which we analyze the performance characteristics (e.g., arrival rate, service rate, average size, and stability condition). Moreover, we study two possible transmission schemes: fully directional and broadcast. In the former, the source nodes transmit a packet either to the relay or to the destination by using narrow beams, whereas, in the latter, the nodes transmit to both the destination and the relay in the same timeslot by using a wider beam, but with lower beamforming gain. In our analysis, we also take into account the beam alignment phase that occurs every time a transmitter node changes the destination node. We show how the beam alignment duration, as well as position and number of transmitting nodes, significantly affect the network performance. Moreover, we illustrate the optimal transmission scheme (i.e., broadcast or fully directional) for several system parameters and show that a fully directional transmission is not always beneficial, but, in some scenarios, broadcasting and relaying can improve the performance in terms of throughput and delay.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1804.0945

Relay-assisted Multiple Access with Full-duplex Multi-Packet Reception

The effect of full-duplex cooperative relaying in a random access multiuser network is investigated here. First, we model the self-interference incurred due to full-duplex operation, assuming multi-packet reception capabilities for both the relay and the destination node. Traffic at the source nodes is considered saturated and the cooperative relay, which does not have packets of its own, stores a source packet that it receives successfully in its queue when the transmission to the destination has failed. We obtain analytical expressions for key performance metrics at the relay, such as arrival and service rates, stability conditions, and average queue length, as functions of the transmission probabilities, the self interference coefficient, and the links' outage probabilities. Furthermore, we study the impact of the relay node and the self-interference coefficient on the per-user and aggregate throughput, and the average delay per packet. We show that perfect self-interference cancelation plays a crucial role when the SINR threshold is small, since it may result to worse performance in throughput and delay comparing with the half-duplex case. This is because perfect self-interference cancelation can cause an unstable queue at the relay under some conditions.Comment: Accepted for publication in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communication

Network-Level Performance Evaluation of a Two-Relay Cooperative Random Access Wireless System

In wireless networks relay nodes can be used to assist the users' transmissions to reach their destination. Work on relay cooperation, from a physical layer perspective, has up to now yielded well-known results. This paper takes a different stance focusing on network-level cooperation. Extending previous results for a single relay, we investigate here the benefits from the deployment of a second one. We assume that the two relays do not generate packets of their own and the system employs random access to the medium; we further consider slotted time and that the users have saturated queues. We obtain analytical expressions for the arrival and service rates of the queues of the two relays and the stability conditions. We investigate a model of the system, in which the users are divided into clusters, each being served by one relay, and show its advantages in terms of aggregate and throughput per user. We quantify the above, analytically for the case of the collision channel and through simulations for the case of Multi-Packet Reception (MPR), and we provide insight on when the deployment of a second relay in the system can yield significant advantages.Comment: Submitted for journal publicatio

Energy-Efficient Cooperative Cognitive Relaying Schemes for Cognitive Radio Networks

We investigate a cognitive radio network in which a primary user (PU) may cooperate with a cognitive radio user (i.e., a secondary user (SU)) for transmissions of its data packets. The PU is assumed to be a buffered node operating in a time-slotted fashion where the time is partitioned into equal-length slots. We develop two schemes which involve cooperation between primary and secondary users. To satisfy certain quality of service (QoS) requirements, users share time slot duration and channel frequency bandwidth. Moreover, the SU may leverage the primary feedback message to further increase both its data rate and satisfy the PU QoS requirements. The proposed cooperative schemes are designed such that the SU data rate is maximized under the constraint that the PU average queueing delay is maintained less than the average queueing delay in case of non-cooperative PU. In addition, the proposed schemes guarantee the stability of the PU queue and maintain the average energy emitted by the SU below a certain value. The proposed schemes also provide more robust and potentially continuous service for SUs compared to the conventional practice in cognitive networks where SUs transmit in the spectrum holes and silence sessions of the PUs. We include primary source burstiness, sensing errors, and feedback decoding errors to the analysis of our proposed cooperative schemes. The optimization problems are solved offline and require a simple 2-dimensional grid-based search over the optimization variables. Numerical results show the beneficial gains of the cooperative schemes in terms of SU data rate and PU throughput, average PU queueing delay, and average PU energy savings

Energy-aware cooperative wireless networks with multiple cognitive users

In this paper, we study and analyze cooperative cognitive radio networks with arbitrary number of secondary users (SUs). Each SU is considered a prospective relay for the primary user (PU) besides having its own data transmission demand. We consider a multi-packet transmission framework that allows multiple SUs to transmit simultaneously because of dirty-paper coding. We propose power allocation and scheduling policies that optimize the throughput for both PU and SU with minimum energy expenditure. The performance of the system is evaluated in terms of throughput and delay under different opportunistic relay selection policies. Toward this objective, we present a mathematical framework for deriving stability conditions for all queues in the system. Consequently, the throughput of both primary and secondary links is quantified. Furthermore, a moment generating function approach is employed to derive a closed-form expression for the average delay encountered by the PU packets. Results reveal that we achieve better performance in terms of throughput and delay at lower energy cost as compared with equal power allocation schemes proposed earlier in the literature. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our theoretical findings