Quasi‐optimal power allocation based on ergodic capacity for wireless relay networks

Half‐duplex amplify‐and‐forward (AF) transmissions may result in insufficient use of degrees of freedom if they always use the cooperative mode regardless of the fading states. In this paper, we investigate the conditions under which cooperation offers better performance and the corresponding optimal power allocation during cooperation. Specifically, we first derive an expression of ergodic capacity and its upper bound for an AF cooperative communication system with n relay nodes. Secondly, we propose a novel quasi‐optimal power allocation (QOPA) scheme to maximize the upper bound of the derived ergodic capacity. For the QOPA scheme, the cooperative mode is only adopted when the channel gain of source‐to‐destination is worse than that of relay‐to‐destination. Moreover, we analyze the performance of the system with QOPA scheme when the relay moves, which is based on the random direction model, in a single‐relay wireless network. For a multi‐relay AF network, we compare the ergodic capacity and symbol error rate, corresponding to the proposed QOPA and equal power allocation schemes, respectively. Extensive simulations were conducted to validate analytical results, showing that both ergodic capacity and symbol error rate of the system with QOPA scheme are better than those of the system with equal power allocation scheme in a multi‐relay AF network. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Comparative performance analysis of cooperative and multi dual‐hop relay networks using MGF approach

In this paper, we analyzed and compared the performance of cooperative diversity systems such as cooperative and multi dual‐hop networks with non‐regenerative relay nodes. The contributions of this study are twofolds. Firstly, analytical expressions of outage probability P_out and average symbol error rate ASER are derived using moment generating function (MGF) analysis of the received SNR with the assumption that the channel experiences Weibull fading and the best relay selection is used. Then, using the analytical results, comparative performance evaluation of cooperative and multi dual‐hop relay networks is done for varying number of relay nodes and different receive diversity schemes such as maximal ratio combining (MRC) and selection combining (SC). The results show that the cooperative relay network has better performance than a multi dual‐hop relay network in terms of P_out and ASER. The results also show that the multi dual‐hop network can achieve the same performance as the cooperative network with the requirement that it needs the deployment of three times more relay nodes.     

Analysis and determination of cooperative MAC strategies from throughput perspectives

In recent years, cooperative communication has been developed as a new communication strategy that incorporates a relay node to assist direct point-to-point transmission. By exploiting cooperative diversity, different types of techniques have been proposed to improve transmission reliability from the physical layer perspective. However, owing to the longer transmission time resulting from the cooperative schemes, there is no guarantee to enhance network throughput in view of the medium access control (MAC) performance. In this paper, system throughput of combined direct/cooperative communication is evaluated by exploiting the proposed analytical model based on the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol. The feasibility of adopting either cooperative or direct communication is also studied in the analytical model. In terms of network throughput, whether to adopt cooperative schemes depends on the tradeoff between cooperative transmission delay and channel quality of direct communication. Moreover, two cooperative MAC protocols are proposed to determine the circumstances to activate cooperative communication according to the channel quality. The full-channel quality indicator based cooperative (FCC) MAC protocol is introduced to choose both the transmission scheme and the relay node according to the full channel quality information. However, the overhead caused by the FCC scheme can degrade the throughput performance as the number of available relays is significantly increased. Therefore, the bitwise competition based cooperative (BCC) MAC protocol is utilized to efficiently determine a feasible relay node for data transmission. Simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of proposed analytical models and cooperative MAC protocols. It is observed that the proposed BCC scheme can outperform both the FCC protocol and conventional direct transmission with enhanced system throughput.     

联合网络编码和中继选择的协作传输方案及其性能分析

研究了Nakagami信道中联合网络编码和双向协作中继选择的中断与平均误码率的性能,基于3个时隙的网络编码方案提出了一种最小化较差用户误码率的协作中继选择策略。在Nakagami信道下,从双向通信的角度,通过理论分析得出其中断概率和平均误码率的解析式和渐近式,同时推导了无协作中继选择时网络编码的中断概率和平均误码率解析式。通过理论分析发现,当Nakagami信道衰落参数降低时,联合网络编码的协作中继选择方案相对于无协作中继选择时的性能增益将逐渐升高。数值仿真实验结果表明,所提策略的平均误码率性能要显著高于无协作中继选择时的网络编码性能。     

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.     

Trust establishment in cooperative wireless relaying networks

In cooperative wireless networks, relay nodes are employed to improve the performance of the network in terms of throughput and reliability. However, the presence of malicious relay nodes in the network may severely degrade the performance of the system. When a relay node behaves maliciously, there exists a possibility that such a node refuses to cooperate when it is selected for cooperation or deliberately drops the received packets. Trust establishment is a mechanism to detect misbehaving nodes in a network. In this paper, we propose a trust establishment method for cooperative wireless networks by using Bayesian framework. In contrast with the previous schemes proposed in wireless networks, this approach takes the channel state information and the relay selection decisions into account to derive a pure trust value for each relay node. The proposed method can be applied to any cooperative system with a general relay selection policy whose decisions in each cooperative transmission are independent of the previous ones. Moreover, it does not impose additional communication overhead on the system as it uses the available information in relay selection procedure. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

分布式协同传输协议设计与系统实现

协同传输作为一种可靠通信技术,通过利用空间分集,能够克服无线通信收发双方经历的信道衰落、噪声干扰、路径损耗等,有效提升系统传输性能。目前有关协同通信技术的基础理论研究较多,但大多数理论研究并没有应用到实际的原理样机中,因此缺少实测数据作为支撑。本文首先设计实现了一种自适应分布式协同传输协议,该协议通过信道感知技术实时获取信道质量信息,自适应地选择协同节点和协同传输方式。通过将所设计的传输协议实现在自主研发的原理样机上,本文从误码率、丢包率和吞吐量三个性能指标上,分别测试了系统在室内、室外、地面、空中等应用场景下的实际传输性能。测试结果表明,相比于传统点对点直传方式,本文所提的自适应分布式协同传输技术能够显著提升节点间的可靠传输性能,实现分布式多节点的自主协同组网通信。      

Joint relay assignment and power allocation for cooperative communications

In the recent years, cooperative communication is shown to be a promising technology to improve the spatial diversity without additional equipments or antennas. With this communication paradigm, energy can be saved by effective relay assignment and power allocation while achieving the required bandwidth for each transmission pair. Thus, this paper studies the joint relay node assignment and power allocation problem which aims to minimize the total power consumption of the network while providing the efficient bandwidth service. We first analyze the minimum power consumption under the bandwidth requirement for different communication modes. Based on the analytical results, we present a polynomial-time algorithm JRPA to optimally solve this problem. The algorithm first constructs a weighted bipartite graph G based on the given transmission pairs and relay nodes. Then, we adopt the KM method to find out a saturated matching M, and assign the relay nodes to the transmission pairs based on the matching. The optimality of the algorithm is also proved. The simulation results show that JRPA algorithm can save about 34.2% and 18.9% power consumptions compared with the direct transmission and ORA schemes in many situations.     

Development of 60 GHz minimum delay spread indoor local area network

This paper describes the design, fabrication, and experimenting of an indoor millimeter-wave local area network system, operating in a new concept of the indoor propagation configuration named minimum delay spread configuration; brass-board models of 10, 100, and 155 Mbit/s transceivers operating at 60 GHz, and a 60 GHz mmic chip set installed in the brass-board models are also described.     

Performance analysis of multi-user diversity in heterogeneous cooperative communication systems

The heterogeneous cooperative relaying technique can be utilized to complete the hierarchical convergence for the multi-radio access networks, where the single heterogeneous cooperative relay is selected and the maximal-ratio combining (MRC) scheme is utilized to achieve the cooperative diversity gain. In order to evaluate performances of the hierarchical convergence mechanism, this paper theoretically investigates the key factors of the multi-user diversity (MUD) gain, the heterogeneous cooperative diversity gain and the large scale fading of the first and second links. The tight closed-form expressions in terms of the outage probability and the average symbol error rate are derived for evaluating how and with what factors impact on the system performance. The analytical and simulation results show that the number of heterogeneous cooperative relay nodes (HCRNs)M and the number of destination stations (DSs)K have great impacts on performances, and the order of outage probability is (M + 1)K. The large scale fading ratio of the first hop to the second hop also has a big impact on performances. Thus in the real network, we can utilize advanced radio resource management schemes to achieve a high multi-user diversity, instead of configuring too many HCRNs for the heterogeneous cooperative diversity gain. Furthermore, we can guarantee the transmission quality between the BS and HCRNs via the network planning to optimize the overall network performance.     

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.     

Secrecy Analysis of Cooperative Vehicular Relaying Networks over Double-Rayleigh Fading Channels

In this paper, we investigate physical-layer security performance of the cooperative vehicular relaying networks, wherein the communication from a source vehicle to the destination vehicle is assisted by an amplify-and-forward (AF) relay vehicle in the presence of a passive eavesdropper vehicle. We assume that the communication links between the vehicles experience double-Rayleigh fading. We also consider two AF relaying protocols: (1) fixed gain relaying which requires partial channel state information (CSI), and (2) variable gain relaying which requires full CSI. Specifically, we derive the novel intercept probability and ergodic secrecy capacity expressions for both fixed and variable gain relaying in the presence of double-Rayleigh fading channels. The numerical and simulation results verify our theoretical and analytical findings, and show the impacts of channel conditions and relay and eavesdropper locations on the system secrecy performance.

     

Broadband hybrid model for relay-aided cooperative MIMO power line communication systems

A hybrid model for broadband multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay-aided indoor power line communications (PLC) system was proposed in this paper. The proposed model combines the top-down and bottom-up approaches and extends to a two-hop relay-aided cooperative system with variable gain relay in amplify-and-forward (AF) mode. Based on the proposed PLC model and generated channel, the channel statistical characteristics are further investigated in 2MHz - 100MHz bandwidth. Simulated results show that the proposed model overcomes the difficulties that the existing models need a lot of topological information of the network or measurements information. It provides a practical simulation analysis method for cooperative relay MIMO-PLC system. The results also show that cooperative MIMO relaying communications can improve the indoor PLC performances and communication reliability.     

协作通信网络中的中继节点选择技术

协作通信作为一种新型的通信模式越来越受到人们的关注,而中继节点选择技术是其关键技术之一,决定了协作能否带来性能增益。文章基于协同节点选择技术的性能评价标准给出了相应的分类方法,对近年来典型的协同节点选择算法并进行分析和比较,得出结论：只有根据系统需求合理地选择、配置中继节点才能更好地优化协同通信的性能。     

A reliable relay selection scheme for SSK modulation in cooperative communication systems

Space shift keying (SSK) modulation is a scheme in which the indices of active transmit antennas play an essential role in carrying information bits. In SSK modulation, the communication channel acts as modulating unit. Therefore, using the conventional relay selection schemes based on channel coefficients are impossible in cooperative systems using SSK modulation. In this paper, we propose a novel relay selection scheme that is applicable in cooperative systems using SSK modulation. The proposed scheme is based on calculating and measuring the Euclidean distances between received signal and all active or inactive channel coefficients. The proposed relay selection scheme is applied for a cooperative communication system with multiple relay nodes and a direct link between source and destination. The analytical expressions are derived to calculate the average bit error rate over Rayleigh fading channels. The analytical and simulation results show that this relay selection scheme can provide a full cooperative diversity order, for SSK modulation. In addition, we show that this scheme can be used at destination as a signal selection method, to select the best received signal from different paths. The analytical results are validated using Monte Carlo simulation studies.     

An efficient cooperative technique for power-constrained multiuser wireless network

Cooperative communication plays an important role in wireless networks by improving network connectivity, spectrum efficiency, power, and communication reliability. Moreover, cooperative communication also facilitates the development of a well-organized approach in order to improve the quality of wireless terminals. Besides, it enables the utilisation of communication resources by allowing the nodes and pathways in a network to cooperate with one another via data transmissions. To control a wireless network, cooperative communication must manage its power to improve a network’s energy efficiency, capacity and reliability. When information is transmitted at a higher power, this decreases the lifespans of both the nodes and the network itself. Thus, controlling over the transmission of power is essential to obtain a sufficient level of bit-error-rate (BER) performance at the receiver. Relay nodes can improve system performance by reducing power consumption. Moreover, the decode-and-forward method is one of the best cooperative relay protocols that can be used to achieve better system performance in power constraints and BERs. In the present paper, system model containing source, destination and relay node is analysed. One cooperative scheme which including decode and forward is employed and investigated. At the experimental and simulation levels, the present paper showed that the power in the transmitters was observed and calculated in order to show the savings which are resulting from the use of relay nodes.     

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.     

Outage probability improvement using a conditional cooperative mechanism in heterogeneous wireless networks

The self-similarity nature of network traffic has been discovered to be a ubiquitous phenomenon in communication networks; meanwhile, heterogeneous wireless cooperative relay networks have received considerable interests in both academia and industry fields. The mechanism of cooperative relay selection is very essential for the design of heterogeneous wireless relay networks. In this paper, based on the self-similar nature of network traffic in heterogeneous wireless cooperative relay network, we propose a new relay selection mechanism called conditional relay selection which can effectively decrease the system outage probability. Compared to conventional relay selection mechanism, the proposed mechanism considers the traffic queue condition of the relay nodes rather than just comparing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Through extensive comparisons with traditional cooperative relay selection mechanisms, the proposed scheme can significantly improve the system outage probability.     

Interference management schemes for multi‐user cooperative wireless networks

Cooperative communication is a promising technique for future wireless networks. It can be used in improving communication reliability and enhancing spectrum efficiency by using the broadcast nature of radio communication and exploiting cooperative diversity. However, its performance gain degrades in the presence of co‐channel interference, which makes it essential to propose interference mitigation schemes. In this paper, we introduce three cooperative communication schemes with interference management for multi‐user cooperative wireless networks. The first scheme (best relay selection) is used as a performance benchmark because it completely avoids the interference problem by using the Frequency‐Division Multiple Access technique. The second scheme (best available relay selection) maximizes the received signal‐to‐noise ratio while keeping the interference levels below a certain threshold, and the third scheme (General Order Relay and User Selection) is based on iterative resource allocation algorithm. We derive exact closed‐form expressions of average bit error probability, outage probability, and average consumed power for the proposed schemes. Simulations are used to validate the analytical results. The results confirm the advantage of the proposed cooperation schemes in enhancing the system performance and improving the interference management. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cooperative communication based access technique for sensor networks

ABSTRACT

The collaboration of users in communication systems is defined as cooperative communication. The cognitive radio, i.e. dynamic spectrum access technique, is a wireless communication technology that provides a great chance for unlicensed users to exploit the frequency bands in an opportunistic way. A wireless sensor network is a widely used communication technology composing of spatially distributed independent sensors in order to monitor physical or environmental circumstances. In this work, a new technique that unlicensed users become a cooperative relay when they are in idle mode is proposed. Along with the proposed technique, unlicensed users help sensor nodes as a cooperative relay when they are in idle mode. Similarly, sensor nodes help unlicensed users for detecting idle frequency bands while in sleep mode. By preventing any disruption that remote users may be exposed owing to signal attenuation, the proposed cooperative relay utilises amplify and forward based cooperative communication protocol. Thanks to this approach; the overall network has greater performance than wireless sensor network that does not use cooperative communication based dynamic access technique in terms of throughput, energy, and delay.