Diversity-Multiplexing Tradeoff for the MIMO Static Half-Duplex Relay

In this work, we investigate the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of the multiple-antenna (MIMO) static half-duplex relay channel. A general expression is derived for the DMT upper bound, which can be achieved by a compress-and-forward protocol at the relay, under certain assumptions. The DMT expression is given as the solution of a minimization problem in general, and an explicit expression is found when the relay channel is symmetric in terms of number of antennas, i.e. the source and the destination have n antennas each, and the relay has m antennas. It is observed that the static half-duplex DMT matches the full-duplex DMT when the relay has a single antenna, and is strictly below the full-duplex DMT when the relay has multiple antennas. Besides, the derivation of the upper bound involves a new asymptotic study of spherical integrals (that is, integrals with respect to the Haar measure on the unitary group U(n)), which is a topic of mathematical interest in itself.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Cooperative Lattice Coding and Decoding

A novel lattice coding framework is proposed for outage-limited cooperative channels. This framework provides practical implementations for the optimal cooperation protocols proposed by Azarian et al. In particular, for the relay channel we implement a variant of the dynamic decode and forward protocol, which uses orthogonal constellations to reduce the channel seen by the destination to a single-input single-output time-selective one, while inheriting the same diversity-multiplexing tradeoff. This simplification allows for building the receiver using traditional belief propagation or tree search architectures. Our framework also generalizes the coding scheme of Yang and Belfiore in the context of amplify and forward cooperation. For the cooperative multiple access channel, a tree coding approach, matched to the optimal linear cooperation protocol of Azarain et al, is developed. For this scenario, the MMSE-DFE Fano decoder is shown to enjoy an excellent tradeoff between performance and complexity. Finally, the utility of the proposed schemes is established via a comprehensive simulation study.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure

Optimal space-time codes for the MIMO amplify-and-forward cooperative channel

In this work, we extend the non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward (NAF) cooperative diversity scheme to the MIMO channel. A family of space-time block codes for a half-duplex MIMO NAF fading cooperative channel with N relays is constructed. The code construction is based on the non-vanishing determinant criterion (NVD) and is shown to achieve the optimal diversity-multiplexing tradeoff (DMT) of the channel. We provide a general explicit algebraic construction, followed by some examples. In particular, in the single relay case, it is proved that the Golden code and the 4x4 Perfect code are optimal for the single-antenna and two-antenna case, respectively. Simulation results reveal that a significant gain (up to 10dB) can be obtained with the proposed codes, especially in the single-antenna case.Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, revised versio