Interference Cancellation at the Relay for Multi-User Wireless Cooperative Networks

We study multi-user transmission and detection schemes for a multi-access relay network (MARN) with linear constraints at all nodes. In a $(J, J_a, R_a, M)$ MARN, $J$ sources, each equipped with $J_a$ antennas, communicate to one $M$-antenna destination through one $R_a$-antenna relay. A new protocol called IC-Relay-TDMA is proposed which takes two phases. During the first phase, symbols of different sources are transmitted concurrently to the relay. At the relay, interference cancellation (IC) techniques, previously proposed for systems with direct transmission, are applied to decouple the information of different sources without decoding. During the second phase, symbols of different sources are forwarded to the destination in a time division multi-access (TDMA) fashion. At the destination, the maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding is performed source-by-source. The protocol of IC-Relay-TDMA requires the number of relay antennas no less than the number of sources, i.e., $R_a\ge J$. Through outage analysis, the achievable diversity gain of the proposed scheme is shown to be $\min\{J_a(R_a-J+1),R_aM\}$. When {\small$M\le J_a\left(1-\frac{J-1}{R_a}\right)$}, the proposed scheme achieves the maximum interference-free (int-free) diversity gain $R_aM$. Since concurrent transmission is allowed during the first phase, compared to full TDMA transmission, the proposed scheme achieves the same diversity, but with a higher symbol rate.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transaction on Wireless Communicatio

Enhancing diversity and multiplexing gains in multi-user wireless relay systems

The demand for higher transmission rates and better quality of service in modern wireless communications is endless. The use of multiple transmit or /and receive antennas has been considered as one of the most powerful approaches to facilitate high -speed and high -quality communications. However, in practical cellular systems, mobile terminals may not be able to support a multiple- antenna setup. Thus an emerging technique called cooperative diversity is under consideration to utilize the multi -hop relay concept to realize the advantages of multiple - antenna systems in multi -user single- antenna networks. Cooperative diversity has attracted much interest in recent years as a very promising direction for future wireless communication evolution.Due to the fact that in practice terminals cannot transmit and receive simultaneously (i.e. the half -duplex limitation), the diversity improvement brought by the standard cooperative diversity transmission protocols is in general accompanied by a multiplexing loss (equivalent to a reduction in transmission data rate in high signal -to -nose ratio (SNR)). The purpose of this thesis is to use advanced transmission protocols to provide both good diversity and multiplexing performance when using the practical repetition -coded decode - and -forward (DF) relaying strategy in uplink mobile -to -base station transmission of cellular systems.The task is fulfilled by relaxing the orthogonal channel allocation requirement of the standard protocols and by using two relays to take turns forwarding source information to destination. We start our analysis from an M- source two -relay one -destination network. Through diversity -multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) analysis, we prove that for an isolated -relay scenario and a strong -interference scenario, the considered approach effectively recovers the multiplexing loss induced by the standard protocols while still obtaining diversity improvement over direct source -destination transmission without considering relaying.In addition, since the optimal multiplexing gain of the considered system can be achieved by the above approach, we study further improving diversity performance for a two -source network. We analyze taking full advantage of the multiple- source structure, multiple -relay structure, and the capability of affording complex signal processing at the destination (base station). For all three cases, we prove that the diversity performance of the above approach can be enhanced without a significant loss of multiplexing performance or using complex coding strategies at relays. Since the good DMT performance is not affected by source -relay channel conditions, the protocols discussed in this thesis make relaying more beneficial

Power Optimisation and Relay Selection in Cooperative Wireless Communication Networks

Cooperative communications have emerged as a significant concept to improve reliability and throughput in wireless systems. In cooperative networks, the idea is to implement a scheme in wireless systems where the nodes can harmonize their resources thereby enhancing the network performance in different aspects such as latency, BER and throughput. As cooperation spans from the basic idea of transmit diversity achieved via MIMO techniques and the relay channel, it aims to reap somewhat multiple benefits of combating fading/burst errors, increasing throughput and reducing energy use. Another major benefit of cooperation in wireless networks is that since the concept only requires neighbouring nodes to act as virtual relay antennas, the concept evades the negative impacts of deployment costs of multiple physical antennas for network operators especially in areas where they are difficult to deploy. In cooperative communications energy efficiency and long network lifetimes are very important design issues, the focus in this work is on ad hoc and sensor network varieties where the nodes integrate sensing, processing and communication such that their cooperation capabilities are subject to power optimisation. As cooperation communications leads to trade-offs in Quality of Services and transmit power, the key design issue is power optimisation to dynamically combat channel fluctuations and achieve a net reduction of transmit power with the goal of saving battery life. Recent researches in cooperative communications focus on power optimisation achieved via power control at the PHY layer, and/or scheduling mechanism at the MAC layer. The approach for this work will be to review the power control strategy at the PHY layer, identify their associated trade-offs, and use this as a basis to propose a power control strategy that offers adaptability to channel conditions, the road to novelty in this work is a channel adaptable power control algorithm that jointly optimise power allocation, modulation strategy and relay selection. Thus, a novel relay selection method is developed and implemented to improve the performance of cooperative wireless networks in terms of energy consumption. The relay selection method revolves on selection the node with minimum distance to the source and destination. The design is valid to any wireless network setting especially Ad-hoc and sensor networks where space limitations preclude the implementation of bigger capacity battery. The thesis first investigates the design of relay selection schemes in cooperative networks and the associated protocols. Besides, modulation strategy and error correction code impact on energy consumption are investigated and the optimal solution is proposed and jointly implemented with the relay selection method. The proposed algorithm is extended to cooperative networks in which multiple nodes participate in cooperation in fixed and variable rate system. Thus, multi relay selection algorithm is proposed to improve virtual MIMO performance in terms of energy consumption. Furthermore, motivated by the trend of cell size optimisation in wireless networks, the proposed relay selection method is extended to clustered wireless networks, and jointly implemented with virtual clustering technique. The work will encompass three main stages: First, the cooperative system is designed and two major protocols Decode and Forward (DF) and amplify and forward (AF) are investigated. Second, the proposed algorithm is modelled and tested under different channel conditions with emphasis on its performance using different modulation strategies for different cooperative wireless networks. Finally, the performance of the proposed algorithm is illustrated and verified via computer simulations. Simulation results show that the distance based relay selection algorithm exhibits an improved performance in terms of energy consumption compared to the conventional cooperative schemes under different cooperative communication scenarios

Physical Layer Service Integration in 5G: Potentials and Challenges

High transmission rate and secure communication have been identified as the key targets that need to be effectively addressed by fifth generation (5G) wireless systems. In this context, the concept of physical-layer security becomes attractive, as it can establish perfect security using only the characteristics of wireless medium. Nonetheless, to further increase the spectral efficiency, an emerging concept, termed physical-layer service integration (PHY-SI), has been recognized as an effective means. Its basic idea is to combine multiple coexisting services, i.e., multicast/broadcast service and confidential service, into one integral service for one-time transmission at the transmitter side. This article first provides a tutorial on typical PHY-SI models. Furthermore, we propose some state-of-the-art solutions to improve the overall performance of PHY-SI in certain important communication scenarios. In particular, we highlight the extension of several concepts borrowed from conventional single-service communications, such as artificial noise (AN), eigenmode transmission etc., to the scenario of PHY-SI. These techniques are shown to be effective in the design of reliable and robust PHY-SI schemes. Finally, several potential research directions are identified for future work.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure

Collaborative modulation multiple access for single hop and multihop networks

While the bandwidth available for wireless networks is limited, the world has seen an unprecedented growth in the number of mobile subscribers and an ever increasing demand for high data rates. Therefore efficient utilisation of bandwidth to maximise link spectral efficiency and number of users that can be served simultaneously are primary goals in the design of wireless systems. To achieve these goals, in this thesis, a new non-orthogonal uplink multiple access scheme which combines the functionalities of adaptive modulation and multiple access called collaborative modulation multiple access (CMMA) is proposed. CMMA enables multiple users to access the network simultaneously and share the same bandwidth even when only a single receive antenna is available and in the presence of high channel correlation. Instead of competing for resources, users in CMMA share resources collaboratively by employing unique modulation sets (UMS) that differ in phase, power, and/or mapping structure. These UMS are designed to insure that the received signal formed from the superposition of all users’ signals belongs to a composite QAM constellation (CC) with a rate equal to the sum rate of all users. The CC and its constituent UMSs are designed centrally at the BS to remove ambiguity, maximize the minimum Euclidian distance (dmin) of the CC and insure a minimum BER performance is maintained. Users collaboratively precode their transmitted signal by performing truncated channel inversion and phase rotation using channel state information (CSI ) obtained from a periodic common pilot to insure that their combined signal at the BS belongs to the CC known at the BS which in turn performs a simple joint maximum likelihood detection without the need for CSI. The coherent addition of users’ power enables CMMA to achieve high link spectral efficiency at any time without extra power or bandwidth but on the expense of graceful degradation in BER performance. To improve the BER performance of CMMA while preserving its precoding and detection structure and without the need for pilot-aided channel estimation, a new selective diversity combining scheme called SC-CMMA is proposed. SC-CMMA optimises the overall group performance providing fairness and diversity gain for various users with different transmit powers and channel conditions by selecting a single antenna out of a group of L available antennas that minimises the total transmit power required for precoding at any one time. A detailed study of capacity and BER performance of CMMA and SC-CMMA is carried out under different level of channel correlations which shows that both offer high capacity gain and resilience to channel correlation. SC-CMMA capacity even increase with high channel correlation between users’ channels. CMMA provides a practical solution for implementing the multiple access adder channel (MAAC) in fading environments hence a hybrid approach combining both collaborative coding and modulation referred to as H-CMMA is investigated. H-CMMA divides users into a number of subgroups where users within a subgroup are assigned the same modulation set and different multiple access codes. H-CMMA adjusts the dmin of the received CC by varying the number of subgroups which in turn varies the number of unique constellation points for the same number of users and average total power. Therefore H-CMMA can accommodate many users with different rates while flexibly managing the complexity, rate and BER performance depending on the SNR. Next a new scheme combining CMMA with opportunistic scheduling using only partial CSI at the receiver called CMMA-OS is proposed to combine both the power gain of CMMA and the multiuser diversity gain that arises from users’ channel independence. To avoid the complexity and excessive feedback associated with the dynamic update of the CC, the BS takes into account the independence of users’ channels in the design of the CC and its constituent UMSs but both remain unchanged thereafter. However UMS are no longer associated with users, instead channel gain’s probability density function is divided into regions with identical probability and each UMS is associated with a specific region. This will simplify scheduling as users can initially chose their UMS based on their CSI and the BS will only need to resolve any collision when the channels of two or more users are located at the same region. Finally a high rate cooperative communication scheme, called cooperative modulation (CM) is proposed for cooperative multiuser systems. CM combines the reliability of the cooperative diversity with the high spectral efficiency and multiple access capabilities of CMMA. CM maintains low feedback and high spectral efficiency by restricting relaying to a single route with the best overall channel. Two possible variations of CM are proposed depending on whether CSI available only at the users or just at the BS and the selected relay. The first is referred to Precode, Amplify, and Forward (PAF) while the second one is called Decode, Remap, and Forward (DMF). A new route selection algorithm for DMF based on maximising dmin of random CC is also proposed using a novel fast low-complexity multi-stage sphere based algorithm to calculate the dmin at the relay of random CC that is used for both relay selection and detection