CHARACTERIZATION OF FUNDAMENTAL COMMUNICATION LIMITS OF STATE-DEPENDENT INTERFERENCE NETWORKS

Interference management is one of the key techniques that drive evolution of wireless networks from one generation to another. Techniques in current cellular networks to deal with interference follow the basic principle of orthogonalizing transmissions in time, frequency, code, and space. My PhD work investigate information theoretic models that represent a new perspective/technique for interference management. The idea is to explore the fact that an interferer knows the interference that it causes to other users noncausally and can/should exploit such information for canceling the interference. In this way, users can transmit simultaneously and the throughput of wireless networks can be substantially improved. We refer to the interference treated in such a way as ``dirty interference\u27\u27 or noncausal state . Towards designing a dirty interference cancelation framework, my PhD thesis investigates two classes of information theoretic models and develops dirty interference cancelation schemes that achieve the fundamental communication limits. One class of models (referred to as state-dependent interference channels) capture the scenarios that users help each other to cancel dirty interference. The other class of models (referred to as state-dependent channels with helper) capture the scenarios that one dominate user interferes a number of other users and assists those users to cancel its dirty interference. For both classes of models, we develop dirty interference cancelation schemes and compared the corresponding achievable rate regions (i.e., inner bounds on the capacity region) with the outer bounds on the capacity region. We characterize the channel parameters under which the developed inner bounds meet the outer bounds either partially of fully, and thus establish the capacity regions or partial boundaries of the capacity regions

Information Theoretic Limits of State-dependent Networks

We investigate the information theoretic limits of two types of state-dependent models in this dissertation. These models capture a wide range of wireless communication scenarios where there are interference cognition among transmitters. Hence, information theoretic studies of these models provide useful guidelines for designing new interference cancellation schemes in practical wireless networks. In particular, we first study the two-user state-dependent Gaussian multiple access channel (MAC) with a helper. The channel is corrupted by an additive Gaussian state sequence known to neither the transmitters nor the receiver, but to a helper noncausally, which assists state cancellation at the receiver. Inner and outer bounds on the capacity region are first derived, which improve the state-of-the-art bounds given in the literature. Further comparison of these bounds yields either segments on the capacity region boundary or the full capacity region by considering various regimes of channel parameters. We then study the two-user Gaussian state-dependent Z-interference channel (Z-IC), in which two receivers are corrupted respectively by two correlated states that are noncausally known to transmitters, but unknown to receivers. Three interference regimes are studied, and the capacity region or the sum capacity boundary is characterized either fully or partially under various channel parameters. The impact of the correlation between the states on the cancellation of state and interference as well as the achievability of the capacity is demonstrated via numerical analysis. Finally, we extend our results on the state-dependent Z-IC to the state-dependent regular IC. As both receivers in the regular IC are interfered, more sophisticated achievable schemes are designed. For the very strong regime, the capacity region is achieved by a scheme where the two transmitters implement a cooperative dirty paper coding. For the strong but not very strong regime, the sum-rate capacity is characterized by rate splitting, layered dirty paper coding and successive cancellation. For the weak regime, the sum-rate capacity is achieved via dirty paper coding individually at two receivers as well as treating interference as noise. Numerical investigation indicates that for the regular IC, the correlation between states impacts the achievability of the channel capacity in a different way from that of the Z-IC

Cooperative Relaying with State Available Non-Causally at the Relay

We consider a three-terminal state-dependent relay channel with the channel state noncausally available at only the relay. Such a model may be useful for designing cooperative wireless networks with some terminals equipped with cognition capabilities, i.e., the relay in our setup. In the discrete memoryless (DM) case, we establish lower and upper bounds on channel capacity. The lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme at the relay that uses a combination of codeword splitting, Gel'fand-Pinsker binning, and decode-and-forward relaying. The upper bound improves upon that obtained by assuming that the channel state is available at the source, the relay, and the destination. For the Gaussian case, we also derive lower and upper bounds on the capacity. The lower bound is obtained by a coding scheme at the relay that uses a combination of codeword splitting, generalized dirty paper coding, and decode-and-forward relaying; the upper bound is also better than that obtained by assuming that the channel state is available at the source, the relay, and the destination. In the case of degraded Gaussian channels, the lower bound meets with the upper bound for some special cases, and, so, the capacity is obtained for these cases. Furthermore, in the Gaussian case, we also extend the results to the case in which the relay operates in a half-duplex mode.Comment: 62 pages. To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Side information aware source and channel coding in wireless networks

Signals in communication networks exhibit significant correlation, which can stem from the physical nature of the underlying sources, or can be created within the system. Current layered network architectures, in which, based on Shannon’s separation theorem, data is compressed and transmitted over independent bit-pipes, are in general not able to exploit such correlation efficiently. Moreover, this strictly layered architecture was developed for wired networks and ignore the broadcast and highly dynamic nature of the wireless medium, creating a bottleneck in the wireless network design. Technologies that exploit correlated information and go beyond the layered network architecture can become a key feature of future wireless networks, as information theory promises significant gains. In this thesis, we study from an information theoretic perspective, three distinct, yet fundamental, problems involving the availability of correlated information in wireless networks and develop novel communication techniques to exploit it efficiently. We first look at two joint source-channel coding problems involving the lossy transmission of Gaussian sources in a multi-terminal and a time-varying setting in which correlated side information is present in the network. In these two problems, the optimality of Shannon’s separation breaks down and separate source and channel coding is shown to perform poorly compared to the proposed joint source-channel coding designs, which are shown to achieve the optimal performance in some setups. Then, we characterize the capacity of a class of orthogonal relay channels in the presence of channel side information at the destination, and show that joint decoding and compression of the received signal at the relay is required to optimally exploit the available side information. Our results in these three different scenarios emphasize the benefits of exploiting correlated side information at the destination when designing a communication system, even though the nature of the side information and the performance measure in the three scenarios are quite different.Open Acces

An Overview of Physical Layer Security with Finite-Alphabet Signaling

Providing secure communications over the physical layer with the objective of achieving perfect secrecy without requiring a secret key has been receiving growing attention within the past decade. The vast majority of the existing studies in the area of physical layer security focus exclusively on the scenarios where the channel inputs are Gaussian distributed. However, in practice, the signals employed for transmission are drawn from discrete signal constellations such as phase shift keying and quadrature amplitude modulation. Hence, understanding the impact of the finite-alphabet input constraints and designing secure transmission schemes under this assumption is a mandatory step towards a practical implementation of physical layer security. With this motivation, this article reviews recent developments on physical layer security with finite-alphabet inputs. We explore transmit signal design algorithms for single-antenna as well as multi-antenna wiretap channels under different assumptions on the channel state information at the transmitter. Moreover, we present a review of the recent results on secure transmission with discrete signaling for various scenarios including multi-carrier transmission systems, broadcast channels with confidential messages, cognitive multiple access and relay networks. Throughout the article, we stress the important behavioral differences of discrete versus Gaussian inputs in the context of the physical layer security. We also present an overview of practical code construction over Gaussian and fading wiretap channels, and we discuss some open problems and directions for future research.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (1st Revision

Hessian-Aware Bayesian Optimization for Decision Making Systems

Many approaches for optimizing decision making systems rely on gradient based methods requiring informative feedback from the environment. However, in the case where such feedback is sparse or uninformative, such approaches may result in poor performance. Derivative-free approaches such as Bayesian Optimization mitigate the dependency on the quality of gradient feedback, but are known to scale poorly in the high-dimension setting of complex decision making systems. This problem is exacerbated if the system requires interactions between several actors cooperating to accomplish a shared goal. To address the dimensionality challenge, we propose a compact multi-layered architecture modeling the dynamics of actor interactions through the concept of role. Additionally, we introduce Hessian-aware Bayesian Optimization to efficiently optimize the multi-layered architecture parameterized by a large number of parameters. Experimental results demonstrate that our method (HA-GP-UCB) works effectively on several benchmarks under resource constraints and malformed feedback settings.Comment: Included important citatio