A coalitional game‐based relay load balancing and power allocation scheme in decode‐and‐forward cellular relay networks

In this paper, a game theoretic relay load balancing and power allocation scheme is proposed for downlink transmission in a decode‐and‐forward orthogonal frequency division multiple access‐based cellular relay network. A system with a base station communicating with multiple users via multiple relays is considered. The relays have limited power, which must be divided among the users they support. In traditional scheme, each relay simply divides its transmit power equally among all its users. Moreover, each user selects the relay with the highest channel gain. In this work, we do not apply the traditional relay scheme. It is because the users are distributed randomly, and by applying the traditional relay selection scheme, it may happen that some relays have more users connected to them than other relays, which results in having unbalanced load among the relays. In order to avoid performance degradation, achieve relay load balancing, and maximize the total data rate of the network, a game theoretic approach is proposed, which efficiently assigns the users to relays. The power of each relay is wisely distributed among users by the efficient power allocation scheme. Simulation results indicate that the proposed game‐based scheme can considerably improve the average sum‐spectral efficiency. Moreover, it shows that by applying the game, users who can connect to uncongested relays join them as opposed to connecting to congested relays. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distributed Relay Selection and Power Control for Multiuser Cooperative Communication Networks Using Stackelberg Game

The performance in cooperative communication depends on careful resource allocation such as relay selection and power control, but the traditional centralized resource allocation requires precise measurements of channel state information (CSI). In this paper, we propose a distributed game-theoretical framework over multiuser cooperative communication networks to achieve optimal relay selection and power allocation without knowledge of CSI. A two-level Stackelberg game is employed to jointly consider the benefits of the source node and the relay nodes in which the source node is modeled as a buyer and the relay nodes are modeled as sellers, respectively. The proposed approach not only helps the source find the relays at relatively better locations and "buy” an optimal amount of power from the relays, but also helps the competing relays maximize their own utilities by asking the optimal prices. The game is proved to converge to a unique optimal equilibrium. Moreover, the proposed resource allocation scheme with the distributed game can achieve comparable performance to that employing centralized schemes.     

Energy‐Aware Hybrid Cooperative Relaying with Asymmetric Traffic

In this paper, we study an asymmetric two‐way relaying network where two source nodes intend to exchange information with the help of multiple relay nodes. A hybrid time‐division broadcast relaying scheme with joint relay selection (RS) and power allocation (PA) is proposed to realize energy‐efficient transmission. Our scheme is based on the asymmetric level of the two source nodes’ target signal‐to‐noise ratio indexes to minimize the total power consumed by the relay nodes. An optimization model with joint RS and PA is studied here to guarantee hybrid relaying transmissions. Next, with the aid of our proposed intelligent optimization algorithm, which combines a genetic algorithm and a simulated annealing algorithm, the formulated optimization model can be effectively solved. Theoretical analyses and numerical results verify that our proposed hybrid relaying scheme can substantially reduce the total power consumption of relays under a traffic asymmetric scenario; meanwhile, the proposed intelligent optimization algorithm can eventually converge to a better solution.     

Nelder‐Mead–based power optimization for secrecy enhancement in amplify‐and‐forward cooperative relay networks

Cooperative communication based on relaying nodes has been considered as a promising technique to increase the physical layer security (PLS) performance in wireless communications. In this paper, an optimal power allocation (OPA) scheme based on Nelder‐Mead (NM) algorithm is proposed for improving the secrecy rate of amplify‐and‐forward (AF) cooperative relay networks employing cooperative jamming (CJ) scheme. The proposed hybrid jamming scheme allows the source and selected relay to transmit the jamming signal along with the information to confound the eavesdropper. The path selection probability of ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is used for selecting the relay for transmission. The performance based on secrecy rate is evaluated for “n” trusted relays distributed dispersedly between the source and destination. Gradient‐based optimization and three‐dimensional exhaustive search methods are used as benchmark schemes for comparison of the proposed power optimization algorithm. The secrecy performance is also compared with conventional AF scheme and CJ scheme without power optimization (EPA). The impact of single and multiple relays on secrecy performance is also evaluated. Numerical results reveal that, compared with the gradient method and exhaustive search algorithm, the proposed power allocation strategy achieves optimal performance. Also, the derived OPA results show a significantly higher secrecy rate than the EPA strategy for both CJ and AF schemes.     

Bandwidth allocation for cooperative relay networks based on Nash bargaining solution

This paper is concerned with the bandwidth allocation problem for cooperative relay networks. The relay takes the roles of not only forwarding the data originated from the users but also of transmitting its own data to the access point. We focus on the interesting questions of when and how the users and the relay can both benefit from the cooperation by bandwidth allocation for relaying among the users. The bandwidth allocation problem is formulated in this paper as a Nash bargaining problem, and then the bandwidth allocation algorithm can be given on the basis of the sub‐gradient method. Simulation results illustrate that users and the relay can both obtain more profits through cooperation. Copyright ©2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Secrecy analysis of a cooperative NOMA network using an EH untrusted relay

In this paper, a down-link non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system with imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC) using Energy-Harvesting untrusted relays is investigated. These relaying nodes use in this study use a power-switching architecture to harvest energy from the sources signals and apply an amplify-and-forward protocol to forward the signals. In addition, transmit jamming or artificial noise, is generated by a source node to improve the security of the system and protect confidential source information from untrusted relays. Likewise, three relaying selection strategies are employed to examine the secrecy performance of the proposed system. In order to evaluate the performance evaluation of the proposed system, closed-form expressions of the Secrecy Outage Probability (SOP) are studied over Rayleigh fading channels and a Monte Carlo simulation is used to confirm the analytical results. Furthermore, we study the effects of various parameters, such as power allocation factors, relay node selection, the number of relays, energy harvesting efficiency and the location of relay nodes on the secure outage performances for two users of NOMA system and conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA). These results show that NOMA offers the better security performance with multiple users.     

Optimal power‐aware relay placement for cooperative wireless sensor networks

We study the problem of optimizing the symbol error probability (SEP) performance of cluster‐based cooperative wireless sensor networks. Recent studies in literature show that an efficient relay selection protocol based on simple geographical information of the nodes to execute cooperative diversity can significantly improve the SEP performance at the destination of such networks. As well, similar line of research on optimal power allocation (for the source and relay nodes) can be found in literature. However, to achieve the best SEP performance at the destination of a cooperative wireless sensor network, joint optimization of power allocation and relay placement should be accomplished. To this aim, we reformulate the SEP of a multi‐hop cooperative communication in a general form and optimize transmitted power level and relay placement simultaneously. This analysis is developed for both amplify‐and‐forward and decode‐and‐forward relaying protocols. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed joint optimization can effectively improve the SEP performance of the network. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

D2D communications with subchannel reusing for throughput‐guaranteed relay selection in LTE

Using full‐duplex relaying in device‐to‐device (D2D) communication, spectrum efficiency can be further improved as compared with traditional half‐duplex relaying. Due to the increasing demands for more system capacities and higher data rate, a throughput‐guaranteed and power‐aware relay selection mechanism is essential so that services can be successfully accomplished within tolerable power consumption. It is also imperative to prevent cellular users from interfering and preserve resources for more users at the same time. In current paper, we proposed an efficient relay selection scheme with subchannel reusing. Using the nonconflict group discovery algorithm, firstly, we divided D2D pairs into different groups based on the neighbor lists of all the devices. The D2D pairs in the same group were considered nonconflictive. By building a matrix that represents the power consumption of D2D transmission peers through relays, we proposed a group‐oriented relay selection scheme based on the Hungarian method allowing subchannel reuse over relay‐assisted D2D networks. Applying this mechanism, different D2D pairs are able to transmit messages at the same subchannel, whenever they are in the same group. Better throughput and spectrum usage than currently available relay selection schemes without subchannel reusing can be obtained. Particularly, more D2D pairs in high dense networks can be accommodated, and spectrum resources can be better preserved. The simulation results showed that our proposed mechanism can improve the total throughput by up to 35% as compared with an existing relay selection scheme without subchannel reusing, called as PRS‐D2D, when most D2D pairs are in a few groups.     

General switch‐and‐examine relaying for demodulate‐and‐forward cooperative diversity

Two new demodulate‐and‐forward schemes of multi‐relay cooperative diversity with switch‐and‐examine relaying (SER) are analyzed. To reduce relay usage and enhance bandwidth efficiency, the two new cooperative diversity schemes employ a switch‐based relay selection. The proposed schemes consume less communication resource than regular relaying schemes, such as the selection combining (SC) or maximal ratio combining (MRC) schemes that always use all relays, and also achieve better performance than distributed switch‐and‐stay schemes. In the first scheme, the decision statistic for relay usage and selection is based on the signal‐to‐noise ratio (SNR). In the second scheme, the log‐likelihood ratio (LLR) of received signals is used for the decision of relay usage and selection. With the two SER schemes, the bit error probability (BEP) of binary phase shift keying (BPSK) and the average number of used paths are derived and expressed in closed‐form for the independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Rayleigh fading channels. Numerical and simulation results are presented for performance illustrations. According to the numerical results, the LLR‐based SER not only achieves a lower BEP but also consumes less relay resource than the SNR‐based SER. Furthermore, the LLR‐based SER scheme even outperforms the corresponding SNR‐based SC scheme for a range of average SNR. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Differential modulation for asynchronous two‐way relay systems over frequency‐selective fading channels

We propose two schemes for asynchronous multi‐relay two‐way relay (MR‐TWR) systems in which neither the users nor the relays know the channel state information. In an MR‐TWR system, two users exchange their messages with the help of N_R relays. Most of the existing works on MR‐TWR systems based on differential modulation assume perfect symbol‐level synchronization between all communicating nodes. However, this assumption is not valid in many practical systems, which makes the design of differentially modulated schemes more challenging. Therefore, we design differential modulation schemes that can tolerate timing misalignment under frequency‐selective fading. We investigate the performance of the proposed schemes in terms of either probability of bit error or pairwise error probability. Through numerical examples, we show that the proposed schemes outperform existing competing solutions in the literature, especially for high signal‐to‐noise ratio values. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Power allocation and relay selection for AF two‐path successive relaying networks

Two‐path or successive relaying, which aims to establish two relay links transmitting different information symbols in adjacent time slots, has recently emerged as an attractive wireless communication protocol to improve the spectral efficiency in half‐duplex cooperative systems. In this paper, we investigate power allocation and relay selection techniques for amplify‐and‐forward two‐path successive relaying networks. Our approach is based on the maximization of the received SNR subject to a total power budget consumed by the source and the relay assisting this specific transmission. Two scenarios including with and without direct link are considered here. We show that the main problem has a closed‐form solution and only requires a few amounts of feedback bits to be broadcasted. Numerical results reveal that the proposed approaches are more insensitive to the inter‐relay interference and robust to channel estimation errors; meanwhile, they perform better than the existing schemes. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Energy‐efficient multiple‐domain bidirectional scheme for G.hn applications

This paper presents an energy‐efficient relaying scheme for G.hn standard. We propose a multi‐domain bidirectional communication network with network coding at the physical layer in order to increase network coverage. The logical link control stack was also modified and supplemented with additional functionality. This reduces the power consumption in the network and enhances the performance while reducing collisions for inter‐domain network access. We consider domain selection to minimize the total energy consumption of the network and present optimal power allocation for the given QoS of each end node. Energy efficiency is evaluated in terms of transmit energy per bit for relay networks with bidirectional symmetric and asymmetric traffic flows. Simulation results show that the proposed multi‐domain bidirectional communication provides improved performance and higher energy savings than the single‐domain unidirectional network, especially in powerline communication channel, which is the worst medium of the three G.hn media. Finally, it was demonstrated that improved energy efficiency can be achieved with appropriate domain selection. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the performance of multi‐hop wireless relay networks

User cooperation has evolved as a popular coding technique in wireless relay networks (WRNs). Using the neighboring nodes as relays to establish a communication between a source and a destination achieves an increase of the diversity order. The relay nodes can be seen as a distributed multi‐antenna system, which can be exploited for transmit diversity by using distributed space–time block coding (STBC). In this paper, we investigate the bit error rate (BER) of multi‐hop WRNs employing distributed STBC at the relay nodes. We develop the general model of WRNs using distributed STBC, and we derive the pairwise error probability and an approximation of the BER. We examine the impact of several parameters, such as distributed STBC at the relays, the number of relays, the distances between the nodes, and the channel state information available at the receivers, on the BER performance of the multi‐hop WRN. The obtained results provide guidelines about the expected error performance and the design of channel estimation for these networks. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Channel capacity of the distributed MIMO relay in visible light communication systems

Visible light communication (VLC) is a novel paradigm that uses light-emitting diode (LED) light as an information carrier and has several advantages over radio-frequency communication in terms of the bandwidth, security and multi-path fading. When the VLC system is considered in an indoor environment, LED lamps, which are placed at the ceiling to provide ambient light, can offer rich spatial resources for VLC as distributed intermediate relaying terminals. This paper introduces a novel distributed multiple-input multiple-output (D-MIMO)-relaying VLC scheme and analyzes its communication performance. Using the sum rate of the broadcasting and multiple access relay channels, a tight upper bound on the channel capacity was derived. The numerical results showed that the D-MIMO-relaying VLC scheme outperformed the direct-path-based scheme in terms of the channel capacity. For a given indoor environment, the capacity of D-MIMO-relaying VLC can be improved further by selecting the appropriate relay parameters, such as the number of LED–PD pairs in a relay, distance between relays and height of relays.     

Distributed spatial–temporal precoding with limited feedback in MIMO multi‐relay systems

Precoding techniques can be introduced into multi‐relay systems due to the similarity between cooperative communication systems and traditional multi‐input–multi‐output (MIMO) systems. In this paper, a channel state information (CSI) feedback scheme based on the zero‐forcing (ZF) relaying protocol is proposed at first, where the information of relaying channel and noise related to each relay node can be compressed into two positive real parameters. Then, based on the proposed feedback scheme, the singular‐vector‐based local temporal precoder is presented at the source node through two continuous transmitted vectors, which is termed as distributed spatial–temporal precoding (DSTP). Moreover, various spatial data rates can be conveniently supported by DSTP. Based on the analysis on DSTP, it is better that the number of data streams is not larger than the number of antennas equipped at the source node. The unitary DSTP with the proposed feedback scheme outperforms not only the close‐loop direct transmission but also the simple ZF relaying method. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the Design of Energy Efficient Transmission in Cooperative Networks with Bidirectional Asymmetric Traffic

Energy efficient transmission has become increasingly important in future green communications. We focus on cooperative networks with multiple Amplify-and-Forward relays deployed in this paper. A joint relay selection and power allocation transmission scheme applicable to both one-way and two-way relay networks is proposed for minimizing the weighted energy consumed per bit transmitted. Close-form analytical results of power allocation are first developed at each relay. Then the relay consuming the least energy or the direct transmission mode is chosen by the sources. Based on the proposed scheme, we characterize the energy consumption for training and power allocation information exchanging between nodes. Besides, the energy efficient cooperating regions are discussed in one-way and two-way relay networks. It is indicated that the shape of the region depends on both the path loss exponent and the asymmetry traffic in the one-way relay network while only lies on the path loss exponent in the two-way relay network. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme yields considerable reduced energy consumption compared to that of the best worse relay selection scheme when proper number of relays is deployed. It is also shown that the two-way relaying can achieve higher energy efficiency than the one-way relaying.     

Wireless information and power transfer using single and multiple path relays

A relay‐based wireless communication model can relay information along with the power bidirectionally using the amplify‐and‐forward scheme. This paper studies such model extensively. Three information and power relaying protocols, that is, time‐based switching relaying, power‐based splitting relaying, and hybrid time switching‐based and power splitting‐based relaying (HTPSR) are used to carry forward bidirectional information and power transfer. First, a solo relay model is studied, for which, we derived a throughput expression for end‐to‐end information transfer, and this is done for all the three relaying protocols. The paper indicates that the system throughput depends upon the time switching and the power splitting ratio. Further, to make the system more reliable and robust, multiple relays are used in the path. Various relay selection schemes are used for path selection in each transmission, thereby yielding different throughput performances. The results show that an optimal throughput is obtained for a given relay location at an optimal set of values of splitting and switching ratio. Moreover, the HTPSR outperforms both the power splitting and time switching protocol in system throughput performance for a single as well as a multiple‐relay model. Whereas, in relay selection schemes, the best SNR selection scheme outperforms in all the schemes used. The simulated results confirm that the system throughput is an active function of relay placement.     

中继未知任何信道信息条件下中继选择的研究

由于信道情况差的中继对协作贡献小,且消耗额外的能量,基于某种标准选择出一个或者多个好的中继参加协作,可以提高协同通信系统性能,所以中继选择是协同通信系统的研究热点。针对一个发送端、接收端及每个中继都配置单根天线的无线中继网络,在假设发送方不知道信道信息而接收方已知全部信道信息前提下,本文提出了中继未知任何信道信息时的中继选择方案。首先提出基于信噪比最大的单中继选择方案,推导了单中继选择的成对错误概率表达式;其次提出基于中继排序方法的多中继选择方案,推导了选择2个中继的成对错误概率的下界;最后给出了仿真结果。理论与仿真结果都表明,中继未知任何信道信息的情况下,选择2个中继参加协作的系统错误概率却高于单中继选择。      

A bandwidth‐efficient cooperative relaying scheme with hard interference cancellation and iterative decoding

This paper considers a coded cooperative relaying scheme in which all successfully decoded signals from multiple sources are simultaneously forwarded by a multi‐antenna relay to a common multi‐antenna destination to increase bandwidth efficiency. Iterative decoding with hard interference cancellation is used at destination to recover user information. By using orthogonal transmission from sources to avoid their mutual interference, the multi‐antenna relay offers receive space diversity that greatly enhances the decoding performance at the relay. This makes the source‐relay transmission more robust, less sensitive to the source‐relay link SNR, and hence increases the contribution of the relay in cooperative transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms direct transmission under the same transmit power and bandwidth efficiency. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cooperative communications with relay selection for wireless networks: design issues and applications

Relay selection schemes for cooperative communications to achieve full cooperative diversity gains while maintaining spectral and energy efficiency have been extensively studied in a recent research. These schemes select only the best relay from multiple relaying candidates to cooperate with a communication link. In the present paper, we reviewed recently proposed cooperative communication protocols that integrate with relay selection mechanisms. The key design issues for relay selection mechanisms, for example, relaying candidate selection, optimal relay assignment, and cooperative transmission, were identified. We further discussed the challenges of optimal relay assignment in multi‐hop wireless sensor networks and presented the potential applications of cooperative communications with a relay selection in such networks. Future research directions were outlined, for example, the issues of service differentiation and system fairness in cooperative communication systems and the joint use of game theory and adaptive learning techniques in relaying candidate selection and optimal‐relay assignment mechanisms for efficient allocation of network resources. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.