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

Spectrally Efficient Cooperative Relay Networks using Signal Space Diversity

Cooperative relaying has received widespread attention in recent years from both academic and industrial communities. It offers significant benefits in enabling connectivity as well as in increasing coverage, power saving, spatial diversity and channel capacity. However, one of the main limitations of the conventional cooperative relaying system is the repetition of the received data by the relays, which reduces the spectral efficiency and the data rate. In this thesis, signal space diversity (SSD) based technique is proposed to incorporate into the conventional relaying system to enhance spectral efficiency, data rate and system performance. Firstly, SSD is introduced into a two-way cooperative relaying system with three-phase two-way decode-and-forward (DF) protocol. In this system, four symbols are exchanged in three time slots, thereby doubling the spectral efficiency and the data rate compared to the conventional three-phase two-way DF relaying system that uses six time slots to exchange the same four symbols. Next, SSD is employed in a dual-hop relaying system using DF protocol without a direct link between the source and the destination. In this system, two symbols are transmitted in three time slots as compared to four time slots to transmit the same two symbols in the conventional dual-hop DF relaying system. These proposed systems are designed to exploit the inherent diversity in the modulation signal-space by rotating and expanding the ordinary constellation. The improvement in spectral efficiency is achieved without adding extra complexity, bandwidth or transmit power. A comprehensive analysis of these proposed systems is carried out over Rayleigh fading channels, and closed-form expressions for various performance metrics, including error probability, outage probability and channel capacity, are derived and illustrated. An asymptotic approximation for the error probability is obtained and is used to illustrate the impact of system parameters and diversity gain on the system performance. The optimization of relay location and power allocation in these systems is also examined. Extensive Monte Carlo simulations are performed to ascertain the accuracy of the analytical results presented in the thesis. Indeed, it is observed that the use of SSD in cooperative relaying can play a major role in the system design and performance improvement

Detect-and-forward relaying aided cooperative spatial modulation for wireless networks

A novel detect-and-forward (DeF) relaying aided cooperative SM scheme is proposed, which is capable of striking a flexible tradeoff in terms of the achievable bit error ratio (BER), complexity and unequal error protection (UEP). More specifically, SM is invoked at the source node (SN) and the information bit stream is divided into two different sets: the antenna index-bits (AI-bits) as well as the amplitude and phase modulation-bits (APM-bits). By exploiting the different importance of the AI-bits and the APM-bits in SM detection, we propose three low-complexity, yet powerful relay protocols, namely the partial, the hybrid and the hierarchical modulation (HM) based DeF relaying schemes. These schemes determine the most appropriate number of bits to be re-modulated by carefully considering their potential benefits and then assigning a specific modulation scheme for relaying the message. As a further benefit, the employment of multiple radio frequency (RF) chains and the requirement of tight inter-relay synchronization (IRS) can be avoided. Moreover, by exploiting the benefits of our low-complexity relaying protocols and our inter-element interference (IEI) model, a low-complexity maximum-likelihood (ML) detector is proposed for jointly detecting the signal received both via the source-destination (SD) and relay-destination (RD) links. Additionally, an upper bound of the BER is derived for our DeF-SM scheme. Our numerical results show that the bound is asymptotically tight in the high-SNR region and the proposed schemes provide beneficial system performance improvements compared to the conventional MIMO schemes in an identical cooperative scenario.<br/

Performance Analysis of Best Relaying Protocol Selection with Interferences at Relays

In this paper, we investigate the performance of selecting the best protocol between amplify and forward (AF) and decode and forward (DF) in multiple relay networks with multiple interferences at relays. In the selection scheme, the best protocol between AF and DF is selected depending on the comparisons of signal-to-interference and noise ratio (SINR) for all source-relay links. All relays measure the received SINR to decide forwarding signal or not. When SINR is above a certain threshold then DF is used otherwise AF is used. Particularly, we develop an accurate mathematical model for best relaying protocol by considering the effect of interferences to our scheme. Firstly, we derive the asymptotic closed form expression for the symbol error rate (SER) for the system under study. Also we derive an upper and lower bound of symbol error rate and show how they were tight with exact SER. Furthermore an approximate expression for the outage probability is derived. Numerical results are finally presented to validate the theoretical analysis with a different number of relays

Dispensing with channel estimation: differentially modulated cooperative wireless communications

As a benefit of bypassing the potentially excessive complexity and yet inaccurate channel estimation, differentially encoded modulation in conjunction with low-complexity noncoherent detection constitutes a viable candidate for user-cooperative systems, where estimating all the links by the relays is unrealistic. In order to stimulate further research on differentially modulated cooperative systems, a number of fundamental challenges encountered in their practical implementations are addressed, including the time-variant-channel-induced performance erosion, flexible cooperative protocol designs, resource allocation as well as its high-spectral-efficiency transceiver design. Our investigations demonstrate the quantitative benefits of cooperative wireless networks both from a pure capacity perspective as well as from a practical system design perspective

Symbol-Level Selective Full-Duplex Relaying with Power and Location Optimization

In this paper, a symbol-level selective transmission for full-duplex (FD) relaying networks is proposed to mitigate error propagation effects and improve system spectral efficiency. The idea is to allow the FD relay node to predict the correctly decoded symbols of each frame, based on the generalized square deviation method, and discard the erroneously decoded symbols, resulting in fewer errors being forwarded to the destination node. Using the capability for simultaneous transmission and reception at the FD relay node, our proposed strategy can improve the transmission efficiency without extra cost of signalling overhead. In addition, targeting on the derived expression for outage probability, we compare it with half-duplex (HD) relaying case, and provide the transmission power and relay location optimization strategy to further enhance system performance. The results show that our proposed scheme outperforms the classic relaying protocols, such as cyclic redundancy check based selective decode-and-forward (S-DF) relaying and threshold based S-DF relaying in terms of outage probability and bit-error-rate. Moreover, the performances with optimal power allocation is better than that with equal power allocation, especially when the FD relay node encounters strong self-interference and/or it is close to the destination node.Comment: 34 pages (single-column), 14 figures, 2 tables, accepted pape