A cross-layer protocol for exploiting cooperative diversity in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks

Cooperative communication has emerged to reap the benefits of spatial diversity. To fully exploit cooperative diversity, we propose a medium access control and routing enabled cross-layer cooperative transmission (MACR-CCT) protocol for improving the performance in multi-hop wireless ad hoc networks (MWAN). Different from previous cooperative protocols that determine a receiver in one hop according to a non-cooperative routing protocol first and then select a cooperative relay, MACR-CCT selects the cooperative relay together with the receiver in one hop to exploit fully cooperative diversity, so that the receiver is selected for higher cooperative gain and closer distance to destination, and the relay is selected to achieve the better throughput performance while considering transmission error. Furthermore, considering that there are multiple source–destination pairs in MWAN, MACR-CCT takes interference mitigation into account to further improve network throughput when selecting the cooperative relay. Besides, we propose a theoretical model to analyze the throughput performance. Finally, we take advantage of simulation results to validate the effectiveness of our analytical model and show that our proposed MACR-CCT protocol can significantly outperform existing packet transmission mechanisms in terms of throughput and delay under the multi-hop multi-flow network scenario.     

Performance analysis of slotted ALOHA and network coding for single-relay multi-user wireless networks

Deployment of wireless relay nodes can enhance system capacity, extend wireless service coverage, and reduce energy consumption in wireless networks. Network coding enables us to mix two or more packets into a single coded packet at relay nodes and improve performances in wireless relay networks. In this paper, we succeed in developing analytical models of the throughput and delay on slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) and S-ALOHA with network coding (S-ALOHA/NC) for single-relay multi-user wireless networks with bidirectional data flows. The analytical models involve effects of queue saturation and unsaturation at the relay node. The throughput and delay for each user node can be extracted from the total throughput and delay by using the analytical models. One can formulate various optimization problems on traffic control in order to maximize the throughput, minimize the delay, or achieve fairness of the throughput or the delay. In particular, we clarify that the total throughput is enhanced in the S-ALOHA/NC protocol on condition that the transmission probability at the relay node is set at the value on the boundary between queue saturation and unsaturation. Our analysis provides achievable regions in throughput on two directional data flows at the relay node for both the S-ALOHA and S-ALOHA/NC protocols. As a result, we show that the achievable region in throughput can be enhanced by using network coding and traffic control.     

The multi-copy diversity for routing in sparse vehicular ad hoc networks

The need for routing based on store-and-carry forwarding has been motivated in sparse vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), since the traditional end-to-end unicast routing is infeasible due to the network disconnection problem. In store-and-carry based routing, the end-to-end message delivery delay is dominated by the store-and-carry procedure rather than the wireless transmission. Therefore, the end-to-end delay in such sparse VANETs can be further reduced by replicating multiple copies of the message to other nodes when possible, i.e., multi-copy routing, to increase the chance of finally finding the destination, which we call this gain as multi-copy diversity. In this paper, we present an analytic framework to evaluate the performance of routing by assessing the multi-copy diversity gain in sparse VANETs. By using this model, we first derive an upper and lower-bound of end-to-end routing delay in sparse VANETs. Our analytic results show that a high level of multi-copy diversity gain is achieved when the network is partially connected, which is in contrast to the conventional expectation that multi-copy routing performs better in severely disconnected networks. Second, we propose a new adaptive multi-copy VANET routing scheme called AMR by exploiting these analytic results. AMR adapts to the local network connectivity and increases the level of multi-copy diversity at significantly reduced routing overhead compared to the well known epidemic routing. We validate the accuracy of our analytic model and the performance of AMR via simulation studies.     

Cross-layer resource allocation over wireless relay networks for quality of service provisioning

The authors propose a physical-datalink cross-layer resource allocation scheme over wireless relay networks for quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees. By integrating information theory with the concept of effective capacity, the proposed scheme aims at maximizing the relay network throughput subject to a given delay QoS constraint. This delay constraint is characterized by the so-called QoS exponent thetas, which is the only requested information exchanged between the physical layer and the datalink layer in our cross-layer design based scheme. Over both amplify-and-forwards (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF) relay networks; the authors develop the associated dynamic resource allocation algorithms for wireless multimedia communications. Over DF relay network, the authors also study a fixed power allocation scheme to provide QoS guarantees. The simulations and numerical results verify that our proposed cross-layer resource allocation can efficiently support diverse QoS requirements over wireless relay networks. Both AF and DF relays show significant superiorities over direct transmissions when the delay QoS constraints are stringent. On the other hand, the results demonstrate the importance of deploying the dynamic resource allocation for stringent delay QoS guarantees.     

Selection Cooperation in Heterogeneous Cooperative Networks

Selection cooperation is an attractive cooperative strategy for wireless networks due to its simplicity and efficiency. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous cooperative network consisting of different kinds of nodes with low-cost radios where the activities of one kind of nodes are triggered by the other kinds of nodes. This is a common scenario for many networks, such as wireless sensor networks. By exploiting the transmission relationship between heterogeneous nodes, we propose a selection cooperation protocol where inducing nodes can cooperate with the following nodes after their own transmissions for improving the communication reliability of the latter nodes. Through performance analysis, we show an interesting feature that the diversity-multiplexing tradeoff of the proposed protocol does not rely on the best relay selection method and the protocol always achieves the full diversity gain. We further develop an energy-efficient best relay selection method based on power control where the power consumption is minimized without decreasing the full diversity order. Simulation results demonstrate the good performance of the protocol and the remarkable energy reduction of the proposed best relay selection method.     

A two‐way relay framework based on interference cancellation in wireless networks

The two‐way relay (TWR) protocols are efficient in providing appreciable throughput gains in wireless networks through the use of network coding to combine packets from multiple channels. The key determinant factor in driving the throughput improvement is the degree of simultaneity achieved in the relay scheme. In this paper, we propose a new TWR protocol named interference cancellation TWR (IC‐TWR), which combines network coding, spatial diversity, and IC techniques to arrive at high degree of simultaneity and in the meanwhile to relax the requirement on channel state information as compared with TWR schemes based on amplify‐and‐forward. Numerical analysis shows that the proposed IC‐TWR is uniformly advantageous over the traditional decode‐and‐forward scheme in terms of system throughput and end‐to‐end delay. The proposed scheme may be useful for system designers of high‐speed multimedia applications in wireless mobile networks, wireless cellular networks, wireless sensor networks, and so on. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal reliable relay selection in multiuser cooperative relaying networks

In this paper, we investigate the problem of optimal reliable relay selection in multiuser cooperative wireless networks in the presence of malicious relay nodes. A general discrete time queueing model for such networks is introduced which takes into account the dynamic variations of the channel state, the dynamic malicious behaviour of relay nodes as well as stochastic arrival of data packets into the system. The model consists of a set of mobile users, one destination node and a set of relay nodes which may be either mobile or fixed. The system uses the benefit of cooperative diversity by relaying in the decode and forward mode. We assume that each user either transmits its packets directly to the destination (direct mode) or transmits them with the cooperation of a selected relay node (cooperative mode). It is assumed that a centralized network controller manages the relay selection process in the system. At each time slot, a malicious relay node in the system may behave spitefully and refuse to cooperate with a user deliberately when it is selected to cooperate with that user. A malicious relay node usually acts stochastically to hide its malicious behaviour for longer time. In such a system, at each time slot the network controller should decide whether a user has to cooperate with any relay node or not and if so, which relay node must be selected for cooperation. First, we show that the malicious behaviour of relay nodes makes the stable throughput region shrink. Then, we propose a throughput optimal secure relay selection policy that can stabilize the system for all the arrival rate vectors strictly inside the network stability region. We show that the optimal policy is equivalent to finding the maximum weighted matching in a weighted bipartite graph at each time slot. Finally, we use simulations to compare the performance of the proposed policy with that of four other sub-optimal policies in terms of average queue occupancy (or queueing delay).     

On Throughput Efficiency of Geographic Opportunistic Routing in Multihop Wireless Networks

Geographic opportunistic routing (GOR) has shown throughput efficiency in coping with unreliable transmissions in multihop wireless networks. The basic idea behind opportunistic routing is to take advantage of the broadcast nature and spacial diversity of the wireless medium by involving multiple neighbors of the sender into the local forwarding, thus improve transmission reliability. The existing GOR schemes typically involve as many as available next-hop neighbors into the local forwarding, and give the nodes closer to the destination higher relay priorities. In this paper, we show that it is not always the optimal way to achieve the best throughput. We introduce a framework to analyze the one-hop throughput of GOR, provide a deeper insight into the trade-off between the benefit (packet advancement and transmission reliability) and cost (medium time delay) associated with the node collaboration, and propose a local metric named expected one-hop throughput (EOT) to balance the benefit and cost. We also identify an upper bound of EOT and its concavity, which indicates that even if the candidate coordination delay were negligible, the throughput gain would become marginal when the number of forwarding candidates increases. Based on the EOT, we also propose a local candidate selection and prioritization algorithm. Simulation results validate our analysis and show that the EOT metric leads to both better one-hop and path throughput than the corresponding pure GOR and geographic routing.     

On the capacity of the single source multiple relay single destination mesh network

In this paper, we derive the information theoretic capacity of a special class of mesh networks. A mesh network is a heterogeneous wireless network in which the transmission among power limited nodes is assisted by powerful relays, which use the same wireless medium. We investigate the mesh network when there is one source, one destination, and multiple relays, which we call the single source multiple relay single destination (SSMRSD) mesh network. We derive the asymptotic capacity of the SSMRSD mesh network when the relay powers grow to infinity. Our approach is as follows. We first look at an upper bound on the information theoretic capacity of these networks in a Gaussian setting. We then show that this bound is achievable asymptotically using the compress-and-forward strategy for the multiple relay channel. We also perform numerical computations for the case when the relays have finite powers. We observe that even when the relay power is only a few times larger than the source power, the compress-and-forward rate gets close to the capacity. The results indicate the value of cooperation in wireless mesh networks. The capacity characterization quantifies how the relays can cooperate, using the compress-and-forward strategy, to either conserve node energy or to increase transmission rate.     

Wireless network coding in slotted aloha with two-hop unbalanced traffic

This paper deals with two representative unbalanced traffic cases for two-hop wireless relay access systems employing network coding and a slotted ALOHA protocol. Network coding is a recent and highly regarded technology for capacity enhancement with multiple unicast and multisource multicast networks. We have analyzed the performance of network coding on a two-hop wireless relay access system employing the slotted ALOHA under a balanced bidirectional traffic. The relay nodes will generally undergo this unbalanced multidirectional traffic but the impact of this unbalanced traffic on network coding has not been analyzed. This paper provides closed-form expressions for the throughput and packet delay for two-hop unbalanced bidirectional traffic cases both with and without network coding even if the buffers on nodes are unsaturated. The analytical results are mainly derived by solving queueing systems for the buffer behavior at the relay node. The results show that the transmission probability of the relay node is a design parameter that is crucial to maximizing the achievable throughput of wireless network coding in slotted ALOHA on two-hop unbalanced traffic cases. Furthermore, we show that the throughput is enhanced even if the traffic at the relay node is unbalanced.     

Routing and transmission scheduling for minimizing broadcast delay in multirate wireless mesh networks using directional antennas

Using directional antennas to reduce interference and improve throughput in multihop wireless networks has attracted much attention from the research community in recent years. In this paper, we consider the issue of minimum delay broadcast in multirate wireless mesh networks using directional antennas. We are given a set of mesh routers equipped with directional antennas, one of which is the gateway node and the source of the broadcast. Our objective is to minimize the total transmission delay for all the other nodes to receive a broadcast packet from the source, by determining the set of relay nodes and computing the number and orientations of beams formed by each relay node. We propose a heuristic solution with two steps. Firstly, we construct a broadcast routing tree by defining a new routing metric to select the relay nodes and compute the optimal antenna beams for each relay node. Then, we use a greedy method to make scheduling of concurrent transmissions without causing beam interference. Extensive simulations have demonstrated that our proposed method can reduce the broadcast delay significantly compared with the methods using omnidirectional antennas and single‐rate transmission. In addition, the results also show that our method performs better than the method with fixed antenna beams. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the improvement of scaling laws for large-scale MANETs with network coding

This paper investigates the problem of how much benefit network coding can contribute to the network performance in terms of throughput, delay, and storage requirements for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), compared to when only replication, storage and forwarding are allowed in relay nodes. We characterize the throughput-delay-storage tradeoffs under different node mobility patterns, i.e., i.i.d. and random walk mobility, with and without network coding. Our results show that when random linear coding instead of replication is used in MANETs, an order improvement on the scaling laws of MANETs can be achieved. Note that previous work showed that network coding could only provide constant improvement on the throughput of static wireless networks. Our work thus differentiates MANETs from static wireless networks by the role network coding plays.     

Cooperative relay to improve diversity in cognitive radio networks

Recent studies demonstrated that dynamic spectrum access can improve spectrum utilization significantly by allowing secondary unlicensed users to dynamically share the spectrum that is not used by the primary licensed users. Cognitive radio was proposed to promote the spectrum utilization by opportunistically exploiting the existence of spectrum ?holes.? Meanwhile, cooperative relay technology is regarded widely as a key technology for increasing transmission diversity gain in various types of wireless networks, including cognitive radio networks. In this article, we first give a brief overview of the envisioned applications of: cooperative relay technology to CRNs, cooperative transmission of primary traffic by secondary users, cooperative transmission between secondary nodes to improve spatial diversity, and cooperative relay between secondary nodes to improve spectrum diversity. As the latter is a new direction, in this article we focus on this scenario and investigate a simple wireless network, where a spectrum-rich node is selected as the relay node to improve the performance between the source and the destination. With the introduction of cooperative relay, many unique problems should be considered, especially the issue for relay selection and spectrum allocation. To demonstrate the feasibility and performance of cooperative relay for cognitive radio, a new MAC protocol was proposed and implemented in a universal software radio peripheral-based testbed. Experimental results show that the throughput of the whole system is greatly increased by exploiting the benefit of cooperative relay.     

Reliable relay assisted wireless multicast using network coding

We first consider a topology consisting of one source, two destinations and one relay. For such a topology, it is shown that a network coding based cooperative (NCBC) multicast scheme can achieve a diversity order of two. In this paper, we discuss and analyze NCBC in a systematic way as well as compare its performance with two other multicast protocols. The throughput, delay and queue length for each protocol are evaluated. In addition, we present an optimal scheme to maximize throughput subject to delay and queue length constraints. Numerical results will demonstrate that network coding can bring significant gains in terms of throughput.     

Optimized constellations for two-way wireless relaying with physical network coding

We investigate modulation schemes optimized for two-way wireless relaying systems, for which network coding is employed at the physical layer. We consider network coding based on denoise-and-forward (DNF) protocol, which consists of two stages: multiple access (MA) stage, where two terminals transmit simultaneously towards a relay, and broadcast (BC) stage, where the relay transmits towards the both terminals. We introduce a design principle of modulation and network coding, considering the superposed constellations during the MA stage. For the case of QPSK modulations at the MA stage, we show that QPSK constellations with an exclusive-or (XOR) network coding do not always offer the best transmission for the BC stage, and that there are several channel conditions in which unconventional 5-ary constellations lead to a better throughput performance. Through the use of sphere packing, we optimize the constellation for such an irregular network coding. We further discuss the design issue of the modulation in the case when the relay exploits diversity receptions such as multiple-antenna diversity and path diversity in frequency-selective fading. In addition, we apply our design strategy to a relaying system using higher-level modulations of 16QAM in the MA stage. Performance evaluations confirm that the proposed scheme can significantly improve end-to-end throughput for two-way relaying systems.     

Joint design of physical and MAC layer by applying the constellation rearrangement technique in cooperative multi-hop networks

Cooperative diversity schemes can be seen as an extension of spatial diversity systems, where distributed antennas are placed in relay nodes distributed in space as compared to a single multi-antenna source or receiver in conventional spatial diversity systems. Such cooperative communication systems improve the diversity gain significantly. In this paper a cross layer optimization scheme, based on cooperative diversity along with constellation rearrangement, is proposed for minimizing energy toll and enhancing the network longevity. By utilizing a cross-layer cooperative strategy, distributive algorithms are proposed for the dependability restriction multi-hop networks. We demonstrate through simulations that the proposed cross-layer cooperative strategies along with constellation rearrangement achieve considerable energy savings and extend the network longevity significantly. Finally the proposed scheme is evaluated through NS2 simulations in terms of throughput and delay.     

The Impact of Channel Feedback on Opportunistic Relay Selection for Hybrid-ARQ in Wireless Networks

This paper presents a decentralized relay selection protocol for a dense wireless network and describes channel feedback strategies that improve its performance. The proposed selection protocol supports hybrid automatic repeat request transmission where relays forward parity information to the destination in the event of a decoding error. Channel feedback is employed for refining the relay selection process and to select an appropriate transmission mode in a proposed adaptive modulation transmission framework. An approximation of the throughput of the proposed adaptive modulation strategy is presented, and the dependence of the throughput on system parameters such as the relay contention probability and the adaptive modulation switching point is illustrated via maximization of this approximation. Simulations show that the throughput of the proposed selection strategy is comparable with that yielded by a centralized selection approach that relies on geographic information.      

Network-coding-based scheduling and routing schemes for service-oriented wireless mesh networks - [Service-oriented broadband wireless network architecture]

Service-oriented wireless mesh networks have recently been receiving intensive attention as a pivotal component to implement the concept of ubiquitous computing due to their easy and cost-effective deployment. To deliver a variety of services to subscriber stations, a large volume of traffic is exchanged via mesh routers in the mesh backbone network. One of the critical problems in service-oriented wireless mesh networks is to improve the network throughput. Wireless network coding is a key technology to improve network throughput in multihop wireless networks since it can exploit not only the broadcast nature of the wireless channel, but also the native physical-layer coding ability by mixing simultaneously arriving radio waves at relay nodes. We first analyze the throughput improvement obtained by wireless network coding schemes in wireless mesh networks. Then we develop a heuristic joint link scheduling, channel assignment, and routing algorithm that can improve the network throughput for service-oriented wireless mesh networks. Our extensive simulations show that wireless network coding schemes can improve network throughput by 34 percent.     

Decode-to-cooperate: a sequential alamouti-coded cooperation strategy in dual-hop wireless relay networks

An optimal cooperation strategy, decode-to-cooperate, is proposed and investigated for performance improvements in dual-hop wireless relay networks. Based on decode-and-forward (DF) strategy with multiple relay selection, we design a novel scheme such that the source node keeps transmitting sequentially and the selected relays cooperate by transmitting the decoded signal using distributed Alamouti coding. We exploit the multipath propagation effect of the wireless channel to achieve lower probability of error and introduce optimum power allocation and relay positioning. We analyze the scenario when the source to destination direct link is not available and derive a closed form expression for symbol error rate (SER), its upper bound and an asymptotically tight approximation to exploit the performance gain by selecting the optimum relays in a multiple-relay cooperation scheme. Moreover, asymptotic optimum power allocation (based on the SER approximation) and optimal relay positioning are also considered to further improve the SER. The proposed relay selection scheme outperforms cooperative (DF) and non-cooperative schemes by more than 2 dB.     

ICAM: integrated cellular and ad hoc multicast

In third generation (3G) wireless data networks, multicast throughput decreases with the increase in multicast group size, since a conservative strategy for the base station is to use the lowest data rate of all the receivers so that the receiver with the worst downlink channel condition can decode the transmission correctly. This paper proposes ICAM, integrated cellular and ad hoc multicast, to increase 3G multicast throughput through opportunistic use of ad hoc relays. In ICAM, a 3G base station delivers packets to proxy mobile devices with better 3G channel quality. The proxy then forwards the packets to the receivers through an IEEE 802.11-based ad hoc network. In this paper, we first propose a localized greedy algorithm that discovers for each multicast receiver the proxy with the highest 3G downlink channel rate. We discover that due to capacity limitations and interference of the ad hoc relay network, maximizing the 3G downlink data rate of each multicast receiver's proxy does not lead to maximum throughput for the multicast group. We then show that the optimal ICAM problem is NP-hard, and derive a polynomial-time 4-approximation algorithm for the construction of the multicast forest. This bound holds when the underlying wireless MAC supports broadcast or unicast, single rate or multiple rates (4(1 + /spl isin/) approximation scheme for the latter), and even when there are multiple simultaneous multicast sessions. Through both analysis and simulations, we show that our algorithms achieve throughput gains up to 840 percent for 3G downlink multicast with modest overhead on the 3G uplink.