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

D13.2 Techniques and performance analysis on energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking

Deliverable D13.2 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the status of the research work of the various Joint Research Activities (JRA) in WP1.3 and the results that were developed up to the second year of the project. For each activity there is a description, an illustration of the adherence to and relevance with the identified fundamental open issues, a short presentation of the main results, and a roadmap for the future joint research. In the Annex, for each JRA, the main technical details on specific scientific activities are described in detail.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Queue stability analysis in network coded wireless multicast.

In this dissertation queue stability in wireless multicast networks with packet erasure channels is studied. Our focus is on optimizing packet scheduling so as to maximize throughput. Specifically, new queuing strategies consisting of several sub-queues are introduced, where all newly arrived packets are first stored in the main sub-queue on a first-come-first-served basis. Using the receiver feedback, the transmitter combines packets from different sub-queues for transmission. Our objective is to maximize the input rate under the queue stability constraints. Two packet scheduling and encoding algorithms have been developed. First, the optimization problem is formulated as a linear programming (LP) problem, according to which a network coding based optimal packet scheduling scheme is obtained. Second, the Lyapunov optimization model is adopted and decision variables are defined to derive a network coding based packet scheduling algorithm, which has significantly less complexity and smaller queue backlog compared with the LP solution. Further, an extension of the proposed algorithm is derived to meet the requirements of time-critical data transmission, where each packet expires after a predefined deadline and then dropped from the system. To minimize the average transmission power, we further derive a scheduling policy that simultaneously minimizes both power and queue size, where the transmitter may choose to be idle to save energy consumption. Moreover, a redundancy in the schedules is inadvertently revealed by the algorithm. By detecting and removing the redundancy we further reduce the system complexity. Finally, the simulation results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms over existing works

D13.1 Fundamental issues on energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking

Deliverable D13.1 del projecte europeu NEWCOM#The report presents the current status in the research area of energy- and bandwidth-efficient communications and networking and highlights the fundamental issues still open for further investigation. Furthermore, the report presents the Joint Research Activities (JRAs) which will be performed within WP1.3. For each activity there is the description, the identification of the adherence with the identified fundamental open issues, a presentation of the initial results, and a roadmap for the planned joint research work in each topic.Preprin

A survey on reconfigurable intelligent surfaces: wireless communication perspective

Using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to improve the coverage and the data rate of future wireless networks is a viable option. These surfaces are constituted of a significant number of passive and nearly passive components that interact with incident signals in a smart way, such as by reflecting them, to increase the wireless system's performance as a result of which the notion of a smart radio environment comes to fruition. In this survey, a study review of RIS-assisted wireless communication is supplied starting with the principles of RIS which include the hardware architecture, the control mechanisms, and the discussions of previously held views about the channel model and pathloss; then the performance analysis considering different performance parameters, analytical approaches and metrics are presented to describe the RIS-assisted wireless network performance improvements. Despite its enormous promise, RIS confronts new hurdles in integrating into wireless networks efficiently due to its passive nature. Consequently, the channel estimation for, both full and nearly passive RIS and the RIS deployments are compared under various wireless communication models and for single and multi-users. Lastly, the challenges and potential future study areas for the RIS aided wireless communication systems are proposed

Resource allocation in networks via coalitional games

The main goal of this dissertation is to manage resource allocation in network engineering problems and to introduce efficient cooperative algorithms to obtain high performance, ensuring fairness and stability. Specifically, this dissertation introduces new approaches for resource allocation in Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) wireless networks and in smart power grids by casting the problems to the coalitional game framework and by providing a constructive iterative algorithm based on dynamic learning theory.  Software Engineering (Software)Algorithms and the Foundations of Software technolog

Adaptive relay techniques for OFDM-based cooperative communication systems

Cooperative communication has been considered as a cost-effective manner to exploit the spatial diversity, improve the quality-of-service and extend transmission coverage. However, there are many challenges faced by cooperative systems which use relays to forward signals to the destination, such as the accumulation of multipath channels, complex resource allocation with the bidirectional asymmetric traffic and reduction of transmission efficiency caused by additional relay overhead. In this thesis, we aim to address the above challenges of cooperative communications, and design the efficient relay systems. Starting with the channel accumulation problem in the amplify-and-forward relay system, we proposed two adaptive schemes for single/multiple-relay networks respectively. These schemes exploit an adaptive guard interval (GI) technique to cover the accumulated delay spread and enhance the transmission efficiency by limiting the overhead. The proposed GI scheme can be implemented without any extra control signal. Extending the adaptive GI scheme to multiple-relay systems, we propose a relay selection strategy which achieves the trade-off between the transmission reliability and overhead by considering both the channel gain and the accumulated delay spread. We then consider resource allocation problem in the two-way decode-and-forward relay system with asymmetric traffic loads. Two allocation algorithms are respectively investigated for time-division and frequency-division relay systems to maximize the end-to-end capacity of the two-way system under a capacity ratio constraint. For the frequency-division systems, a balanced end-to-end capacity is defined as the objective function which combines the requirements of maximizing the end-to-end capacity and achieving the capacity ratio. A suboptimal algorithm is proposed for the frequency-division systems which separates subcarrier allocation and time/power allocation. It can achieve the similar performance with the optimal one with reduced complexity. In order to further enhance the transmission reliability and maintaining low processing delay, we propose an equalize-and-forward (EF) relay scheme. The EF relay equalizes the channel between source and relay to eliminate the channel accumulation without signal regeneration. To reduce the processing time, an efficient parallel structure is applied in the EF relay. Numerical results show that the EF relay exhibits low outage probability at the same data rate as compared to AF and DF schemes

Power efficient designs for 5G wireless networks

In this dissertation, to step forward towards green communication, we study power efficient solutions in three potential 5G wireless networks, namely an asynchronous multicarrier two-way Amplify-and-Forward (AF) relay network, a multi-carrier two-way Filter-and-Forward (FF) network, and a massive Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) network using the Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) scheme. In the first network, two transceivers using the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) scheme communicate through multiple relays in an asynchronous manner. As an attempt to design a simple solution, we assume the AF protocol at the relays. We jointly design the power allocation and distributed beamforming coefficients to minimize the total transmission power subject to sum-rate constraints. We propose an optimal semi-closed form solution to this problem and we show that at the optimum, the end-to-end channel has only one non-zero tap. To extend the first work to high data-rate scenarios, we consider a second relaying-based network which consists of two OFDM-based transceivers and multiple FF relays. We propose two approaches to tackle a total transmission power minimization problem: a gradient steepest descent-based technique, and a low-complexity method enforcing a frequency-flat Channel Impulse Response (CIR) response at the optimum. As the last network, we consider a massive MIMO-NOMA network with both co-located and distributed structures. We study the joint problem of power allocation and user clustering to minimize the total transmit power subject to QoS constraints. We propose a novel clustering algorithm which groups the correlated users into the same cluster and has an unique ability to automatically switch between using the spatial-domain-MIMO and the power-domain-NOMA. We show that our proposed method can substantially improve the feasibility probability and power consumption performance compared to existing methods