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

Joint Power and Resource Allocation for Block-Fading Relay-Assisted Broadcast Channels

We provide the solution for optimizing the power and resource allocation over block-fading relay-assisted broadcast channels in order to maximize the long term average achievable rates region of the users. The problem formulation assumes regenerative (repetition coding) decode-and-forward (DF) relaying strategy, long-term average total transmitted power constraint, orthogonal multiplexing of the users messages within the channel blocks, possibility to use a direct transmission (DT) mode from the base station to the user terminal directly or a relaying (DF) transmission mode, and partial channel state information. We show that our optimization problem can be transformed into an equivalent "no-relaying" broadcast channel optimization problem with each actual user substituted by two virtual users having different channel qualities and multiplexing weights. The proposed power and resource allocation strategies are expressed in closed-form that can be applied practically in centralized relay-assisted wireless networks. Furthermore, we show by numerical examples that our scheme enlarges the achievable rates region significantly.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, June 201

Mathematical optimization and signal processing techniques for cooperative wireless networks

The rapid growth of mobile users and emergence of high data rate multimedia and interactive services have resulted in a shortage of the radio spectrum. Novel solutions are therefore required for future generations of wireless networks to enhance capacity and coverage. This thesis aims at addressing this issue through the design and analysis of signal processing algorithms. In particular various resource allocation and spatial diversity techniques have been proposed within the context of wireless peer-to-peer relays and coordinated base station (BS) processing. In order to enhance coverage while providing improvement in capacity, peer-to-peer relays that share the same frequency band have been considered and various techniques for designing relay coefficients and allocating powers optimally are proposed. Both one-way and two-way amplify and forward (AF) relays have been investigated. In order to maintain fairness, a signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) balancing criterion has been adopted. In order to improve the spectrum utilization further, the relays within the context of cognitive radio network are also considered. In this case, a cognitive peer-to-peer relay network is required to achieve SINR balancing while maintaining the interference leakage to primary receiver below a certain threshold. As the spatial diversity techniques in the form of multiple-input-multipleoutput (MIMO) systems have the potential to enhance capacity significantly, the above work has been extended to peer-to-peer MIMO relay networks. Transceiver and relay beamforming design based on minimum mean-square error (MSE) criterion has been proposed. Establishing uplink downlink MSE duality, an alternating algorithm has been developed. A scenario where multiple users are served by both the BS and a MIMO relay is considered and a joint beamforming technique for the BS and the MIMO relay is proposed. With the motivation of optimising the transmission power at both the BS and the relay, an interference precoding design is presented that takes into account the knowledge of the interference caused by the relay to the users served by the BS. Recognizing joint beamformer design for multiple BSs has the ability to reduce interference in the network significantly, cooperative multi-cell beamforming design is proposed. The aim is to design multi-cell beamformers to maximize the minimum SINR of users subject to individual BS power constraints. In contrast to all works available in the literature that aimed at balancing SINR of all users in all cells to the same level, the SINRs of users in each cell is balanced and maximized at different values. This new technique takes advantage of the fact that BSs may have different available transmission powers and/or channel conditions for their users

Distributed radio resource management in LTE-advanced networks with type 1 relay

Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced is proposed as a candidate of the 4th generation (4G) mobile telecommunication systems. As an evolved version of LTE, LTE- Advanced is also based on Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) and in addition, it adopts some emerging technologies, such as relaying. Type I relay nodes, de_ned in LTE-Advanced standards, can control their cells with their own reference signals and have Radio Resource Management (RRM) functionalities. The rationale of RRM is to decide which resources are allocated to which users for optimising performance metrics, such as throughput, fairness, power consumption and Quality of Service (QoS). The RRM techniques in LTE-Advanced networks, including route selection, resource partitioning and resource scheduling, are facing new challenges brought by Type 1 relay nodes and increasingly becoming research focuses in recent years. The research work presented in this thesis has made the following contributions. A service-aware adaptive bidirectional optimisation route selection strategy is proposed to consider both uplink optimisation and downlink optimisation according to service type. The load between di_erent serving nodes, including eNBs and relay nodes, are rebalanced under the _xed resource partitioning. The simulation results show that larger uplink throughputs and bidirectional throughputs can be achieved, compared with existing route selection strategies. A distributed two-hop proportional fair resource allocation scheme is proposed in order to provide better two-hop end-to-end proportional fairness for all the User Equipments (UEs), especially for the relay UEs. The resource partitioning is based on the cases of none Frequency Reuse (FR) pattern, full FR pattern and partial FR patterns. The resource scheduling in access links and backhaul links are considered jointly. A proportional fair joint route selection and resource partitioning algorithm isproposed to obtain an improved solution to the two-hop Adaptive Partial Frequency Reusing (APFR) problem with one relay node per cell. In addition, two special situations of APFR, full FR and no FR, are utilised to narrow the iterative search range of the proposed algorithm and reduce its complexity